My
First
Eighty
Years
First
Eighty
Years
Helen Wilson
Paul's Book Arcade
Hamilton
Mdccccli
Second edition 1951
The first printing of this book was made possible by a grant from the New Zealand State Literary Fund.
A Warning
Recently three friends were, in my presence, discussing the 1913 strike. Each of them had been intimately associated with that event. Each had a clear and retentive memory, yet on the essential facts of that piece of history each differed.
Again, the police tell us that from six eye-witnesses of an accident they will be given six varying accounts of what occurred. How then can history be implicitly believed? And memoirs, which are a microscopic portion of history, must lie under the same suspicion. No one account can be entirely accurate. I am not suggesting that memoirs are deliberately falsified. For my part the temptation is to make the telling tedious by introducing too many explanations in the interests of truth. So, as every one of us can see life from his or her angle only, the best any one of us can do is ‘to draw the thing as he sees it’. This shall be my endeavour.
My thanks are due to Joan Ostler, who read the proofs, and to Mr John Pascoe, for arranging and selecting the illustrations. I am sorry that so few photographs survived and that, of these, one or two of the most interesting were too faded to be reproduced.
Helen Wilson
To the Memory of My Husband Who Gave the Savour to Life
Chapter1
High Country Childhood
My youngest grandson lately exhibited a passing interest in his ancestry. Enquiring into it he found that he was a true-born Englishman in that he seemed to be derived from all the races that ever touched British shores; he also found that he came from a long line of very respectable, law-abiding, often devout, but, on the whole, deadly uninteresting forebears, one of whom here presumes to offer the reader some experiences of her long life.
I suppose that the earliest memories of most of us concern our mothers. I have a mental picture of mine rapturously unwrapping the mail — monthly mail — and saying as she unfolded copies of Punch, The Illustrated London News, Cornhill and other magazines:
‘No one can possibly feel isolated or out-of-the-world with picture papers like this coming straight from the centre of things. Why, they take you right to the scene of action.’
This must have been in 1875, and my recollection is that the pictures were of the Paris Commune, but as that belonged to four or five years earlier I must conclude that only old numbers were given to six-year-old me. No doubt illustrations meant more in the days when films were undreamed of and photographs a rarity. At any rate I can still see those Punches representing Dizzy with his curls, Gladstone with his pomposity and even Palmerston with his flamboyant whiskers, his striped trousers and his straw or twig between his teeth. Those early impressions are not yet quite effaced.
We lived then at Ben Ohau, one of the more remote of the sheep-stations of the Mackenzie Country. We were 108 miles — three days' drive — from Timaru, our town.
My father had brought my mother from Melbourne as a bride of eighteen, not, certainly, to Ben Ohau, but to Ben More, a somewhat less isolated station on the Otago side of the Waitaki River, which my father was then managing for
Life at Ben More, to a girl fresh from the gaieties of Melbourne, might have seemed a pioneer existence, but the stories that my mother used to tell of that time did not impress me with the hardships of pioneering, but with its fun.
There were stories of long rides to dances on neighbouring runs when evening finery hung in a band-box over the husband's saddle. Has it ever struck you that handy little leather suitcases are a modern invention? Our grandparents travelled with chests, large or not so large, or with cardboard boxes, unashamed. Remember the old lady who, anxious to lose none of her things, kept repeating the inventory throughout the journey: ‘Big box, little box, hand-box, bundle!’
When you rode sixty miles to a party, you didn't think it strange that it lasted three days or more. Sometimes these parties were at Otekaike, sometimes at homes less magnificent but quite as delightful — games, dances, charades, theatricals, picnics, sports. They seemed to know how to amuse themselves.
A gang of shearers went from shed to shed, and, wherever the gang happened to be at Christmas time, a race-meeting combined with sports was held. Shearers, owners and station-hands entered their horses and themselves for the events, and at night they all danced
These were New Zealand's times of roaring prosperity. I remember no such times. The stories were fairy tales of the Golden Age to me, glimpses of good times that had passed.
Once my father and mother took a six-weeks' drive over the Lindis Pass and down the
When the next baby was expected, the family was taken to Melbourne, where a son was born and died some months later. We returned then, and took a house in Dunedin, where my sister was born. In the meantime, my father had bought Ben Ohau station, where he now took his family to live. This clumsy hybrid name was, by us, called and written ‘Ben Ohou’. ‘Ohu’ is the phonetic spelling of the pronunciation, I think.
The house at Ben Ohau was a primitive structure built of cob — that is, puddled clay — and roofed with thatch. It had evidently been begun as one largish room with a small one leading out of it on each side. As other rooms were needed, they had been added in a row, with a verandah along the whole front by, which they were entered. There
At the end of the verandah, a room had been recently built of timber with a corrugated iron roof. This was considered too cold in winter and too hot in summer to be used as a bedroom. It was called the bathroom, which meant that a round painted bath-tub was placed there and water was carried to it in pails. This was emptied by pouring the water back into pails. I think that my father was the only one who used that room. He had a cold bath carried in, and in the winter the water had to be left in the pail, because in the shallow bath it would have been frozen solid. We children had our baths in the same sort of tub placed before the nursery fire. There was no such thing as lying luxuriously submerged under warm water, as we expect. to do in bathing to-day. You squeezed water over you with a sponge. It was at least six years later that I first heard of a bath with a tap to fill it and a plug to let the water out. It sounded so wonderful that, when friends of ours in Timaru had such a bath installed, I walked two miles on purpose to look at it. It was a tin bath, with no hot tap, and the plug let the water out through a hole in the floor, out into the wide world. It was called ‘American plumbing’.
Looking back, I can see that my father was worse off, now he had his own station, than when he had managed Ben More. There was comfort enough in the home, and plenty of leisure, but absolutely no style and also no companionship. I often wonder what the servants did all day, for there was always a married couple and a nurse-maid. At one time, we had a man and his wife and their two daughters. They had just landed from Yorkshire, my father's county, and wanted to be together. My sister who was five acquired a broad Yorkshire dialect.
Mackenzie Country is a vast upland plain surrounded by a ring of mountains which rob the air of most of its moisture. How it was discovered is one of New Zealand's oft-told romances that need not be retold. The soil is probably rich enough, but the perpetual drought and bleak winds from the snowfields are not helpful to vegetation. From the point of view of fertility, it is a God-forsaken tract of land, but those who lived there always spoke and acted as if belonging to the Mackenzie Country added cubits to their stature.
Ponies, pet lambs, puppies, an extraordinary profusion of small fruits, jam and cordial making, tramps with my mother, watching her sketch and trying to imitate her, snowballing in winter, sliding and trying to skate, lessons with my mother in the morning, and walks with the nurse and the younger brother and sister in the afternoon, a trip to Timaru once each year; this was life in Mackenzie Country. Nature wore a harsh visage there. The plant life that managed to exist proclaimed it. There was no shelter, no forest on the bleak plains, but, where streams cut banks, a few hardy shrubs maintained life in their protection. One, called ‘Wild Irishman’, was a gnarled shrub entirely composed of long, hard thorns. It had no visible leaves. Broom was represented by a dwarf native shrub on the long, tough, greenish streamers of which no leaves were apparent. The plains were dotted by a plant we called a Spaniard, which looked like a yellow porcupine and at its best grew as high as a chair-seat. Each leaf — if you can call them leaves — ended in a sharp point like a bayonet, strong and poisonous.
My niece quite recently motored through Mackenzie Country. She wrote that she had always been led to believe that the family fortunes had fallen irretrievably when we lost Ben Ohau. After seeing it, she thought a church-mouse would be well rid of it. Of all the poverty-stricken, desolate, lean and hungry places, give her Mackenzie Country, especially Ben Ohau. What heresy that would have seemed in our day! Fortunes were made (and lost) in those uplands.
Nature, especially animal life, plays a large part in the life of the country child. I grew devoted — absurdly so — to the denizens of the farm-yard and my special pets. A strange collection used to accompany us on our afternoon walks. A pigeon that had hurt its leg would fly to us, wait till we had gone on a spell, and catch us up, alighting, sometimes, on our shoulders. There was also a friendly piglet and a turkey hen that had been reared by hand, as well as the more usual dogs, cats, kittens, puppies and pet lambs.
Once a cook, plucking a fowl, pointed out to me that its wings ended in five digits (fingers, she called them) exactly like our own fingers and thumbs. I was vastly impressed. I followed up the thought and found the same in all my animal friends, which was as far as my limited observation went. All species seemed to begin with a head, fastened to a backbone from which were appended four limbs, each used for flying, walking or climbing, each ending in ten digits. Had God but one idea, one plan of creation? I was taken a step further.
The making of jelly was one of the seasonal occupations. It was then actually made from the feet and shins of calves or beasts killed for beef. After days of boiling, the liquid was strained, clarified with egg-shell, sweetened, flavoured, and bottled for summer use. Poking among the long-boiled bones thrown out for the dogs, I discovered what I thought must be rudimentary fingers or toes curled inside the cloven hoofs. I called Mrs Kemsly, who had shown me the digits on a fowl-wing, and she confirmed my fancy. I was awestruck. I was filled with speculation almost to bursting, when suddenly I felt I had discovered the awful truth — these animals, so dear to me, were really people, human beings on whom a wicked witch had cast a spell, or, it might be, an avenging God (I saw little difference) who, for a crime, had doomed them to this voiceless shape: a worse fault, perhaps, than that of Adam and Eve. Oh! It was dreadful! It might happen to anybody. How could I, not conspicuous for virtue, be sure of remaining a little girl? Then, to account for the beauty and lovableness of those condemned people, I invented a good fairy — or a kind angel — who, moved by pity, had begged permission to bestow on each a gift — soft fur, wings, shining plumage, or, perhaps, usefulness by which they might appeal to humans, who could make their lives tolerably happy. All the same, they were for ever yearning to throw off the spell and regain human form and speech. Did we not hear, by the pathetic sounds they made, how hard they were trying to be understood? I looked into their eyes and knew that they were trying, in deadly secrecy, to tell me their hope that some day they would be freed. Something would happen, some heroic act, some enormous sacrifice, some lifting of the veil would suddenly transform them to their proper shape, and those who remember the egoism of childhood will know that the liberator was to be a certain little girl with no distant resemblance to myself, only she would be very beautiful and good beyond the dreams of men and angels.
This does not mean that I had any universal love and sympathy with human beings. Contrariwise, my sister was a dear golden-haired little girl, but I had no desire to make her lot happier. In fact, I was an irritable, rebellious problem child. It was not till I was fifteen and my world was feeling the first tremors of Darwinism, that I entirely abandoned my fairy-tale.
Winter was a lean time everywhere, but especially on those cold uplands. Preserving of the kindly fruits of the summer was unknown, except as jams. No tinned goods, except sardines and, later, salmon, were available. Salt butter was universal, though occasionally a stall-fed cow enabled a farmer to make a few pounds of fresh butter. Usually we were lucky, as there was a meagre supply of milk. I remember once the snow was deep on the ground and some accident had happened to our winter cow. The privations must have been pretty real, but there seemed to be no fuss made about it, nor any complaints. I don't believe this was exceptional. It was the recognised duty of wives to take what was provided and make the best of it, and to see to it that the head of the house was incommoded as little as possible. On the other hand, complaints may have been carefully kept from the nursery.
The unbridged rivers were the true curse to us, and to all Canterbury. I believe that never did the monthly mail arrive at the station but it contained an account of at least one drowning accident. This did not include swaggers — sundowners, we called them — who would only be ‘body
My father drove what was then called a Galloway team — three horses abreast — in a waggonette. Two were considered not sufficient for the journey, and a four-in-hand was the team of the really wealthy. Often one horse was left behind as we neared the town and the roads improved. Once we had an accident on the way home. At a steep little pinch, pulling up out of a small river, my father injudiciously gave a spirited horse a sharp flick. Paddy promptly kicked the trap to pieces. We had seven miles to walk to the ford-man's cottage at the
The ‘May storm’ is still remembered in the chronicles of Mackenzie Country. Usually snow did not fall heavily there till after June, and in April or May the squatters mustered the mountainous ridges and drove the sheep to the lower country that they might not be imprisoned on the heights by the snowdrifts. That year, 1878, Ben Ohau had mustered early, and most of the sheep were down on the flats. When an exceptional fall of snow came on the eighth of May, my father, no doubt, congratulated himself on his early muster, but the snowfall, about sixteen inches, as far as I can remember, was followed by six weeks' heavy frosts. Every night, the snow froze hard, every day the hot sunshine melted the surface, which froze again at night, till the paddocks were overlaid by clear, hard ice some two inches thick. The unfortunate sheep could see the grass through it, and died feebly tapping the hard surface. The Ben Ohau flock perished and had to be renewed. One of the young station-hands put sledge-runners on a box and we three children were pulled about over the hard snow, but I was old enough to be overwhelmed by the misery of it all and got no enjoyment from the sleighing.
In 1936, I met in Timaru the present owner of Ben Ohau, Mr Cameron. He told me that an even more disastrous storm had since then almost effaced the memory of the ‘May storm’ of 1878, but that the run was, nevertheless, quite a profitable concern. They grow more winter feed now. He offered, if I could have stayed, to take me out to lunch and back the same day! He also told me that the old cob-and-thatch house had then only just been demolished. How I wished that I could have accepted this offer to see it all again, but I was President of the Women's Division at the time, and a meeting had been arranged for me in Oamaru for the following day.
Though it is casting ahead, I do not want to leave station life without mentioning one feature that was beginning to
Why were these animals ever bred? Because Sir Julius Vogel had, in 1870, conceived the brilliant idea of raising a Government loan with which to build railways, roads and bridges. Labour was required. Large numbers of immigrants were brought in and employed on these public works. Their wages, spent largely on food, raised the demand for produce. Prices of stock and prices of land rose to match. New Zealand was prosperous. Investors heard of the matter and hastened to buy land and farm it. Labourers flocked to enjoy the high wages, each adding his quota to the boom and to the inflation of prices. Then, the loan spent, what could there be but a slump? Refrigeration was unknown; therefore, exports were confined to those commodities that did not deteriorate on a long voyage — wool, hides, tallow, wheat, salt butter, honey — and, when the price of wool fell to zero, New Zealand was in a bad way indeed. Let the reader remember this digression. It explains things related hereafter.
In 1876, when my brother was born, we took and furnished a house in Timaru, and obviously intended to live there. This was before the ‘May storm’ and before the big drop in wool. Things probably looked bright. Timaru Herald and Member of Parliament for the district. It seems that there was a Bill introduced into the House of Representatives for the revaluing of the squatters' leases.
The Pied Piper at that opening function.
I do not agree with those who extol the advantages of being brought up entirely in the country. I am sure I was a backward, stupid child, but that year in Timaru I awoke to consciousness and began to understand how the world wags.
My first party should have taught me something, but I doubt if it did. A friend a little older than myself came with me. Her people lived nearby. Their nurse took us both and my father called for us and took us home. Returning, our house was first en route. I danced in, full of glee, saying, ‘There was a Christmas tree! See what they gave me!’ and displayed a bead necklace squeezed in a sticky hand because it had ‘got broke’.
‘Is that all you got?’ asked my companion. ‘Look at my things!’ She opened a neatly packed basket and exhibited a doll's washing-tub and board, a doll's bedstead with blankets, sheets and pillows, an orange velvet carrot pincushion (most desirable), a shell box, and a pen-wiper with a puppy to hold it by. In answer to enquiries as to why she was so lucky, she explained to the grown-ups, ‘Oh, you see, Nell doesn't know how to manage at a Christmas tree; she just hopped about shaking her beads, as if she didn't want anything else. I put mine by, and came and stood by
I felt dreadfully humiliated, and hastened to explain that I had had a packet of sweets as well, only they got spilt. That made things worse, for they laughed, and I knew the laugh was at my expense. Later, when I was still awake pondering on how I ought to have behaved, I heard my father say, ‘Well! Anyway, I would rather have our Nell and her broken beads.’ I couldn't understand why he should say that, in face of such ignominious failure on my part, but it comforted me.
The companions of our early years are often lost in the moves and mists of life. It was otherwise with M —. I was in contact with her till her death.
She grew up beautiful, ‘faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null,’ came out in style, spent several gay years in Timaru, with occasionally a flutter in Christchurch, and then, somewhat late in life for those days, married a man with fair prospects, but considered unlikeable by almost everybody. It was certainly not a love-match. Even during the engagement period, she sometimes used her sharp tongue to make him look small. They lived a cat-and-dog life. No! Dogs and cats are noisy, vulgar plebeians, without much venom — these were gilded snakes with poison under their tongues and cold hatred in their hearts. There were no children, not even a dog or a cat in the house on which a warm ray of feeling might have fallen. They hurt each other, at the same time immunising each his or her own skin against the darts of the other. Bitterness showed on his face, but hers was as sweet as an angel's. With a smile like rippling water on her thin, delicate lips she would launch the most poisonous barbs. Hers was the sharper tongue, but his ability to hurt was reinforced by the power of the purse, not a long one. Why did they live together? Well! She
In 1879, our family's holiday was taken earlier. My father and mother and I went to Dunedin in April. We stayed with the John Connells at If any of them still live please receive my greetings, for I have lost touch.
Looking out of the bedroom window early on the Friday morning, I saw one of the station hands, slowly riding old Timbertoes, a station horse, up the Cains' long drive. I have never had a true premonition in my life, unless this was one. I do not think I definitely guessed disaster, but I refrained for some unknown reason from mentioning that I had seen the man. At breakfast, my mother joked and made plans, while the Cain girls, Kitty and Ellis, were gloomy and quiet. My mother remonstrated about their solemn faces. Then somebody said to me, ‘Run away, Nell’, but I heard enough
It seems that the wool was being shipped that year over the unfordable Ohau river to Oamaru. Across the river ran a wire rope on which hung a cage that held four bales of wool. On the Ben Ohau side, there was a high cliff of red slate on which was built a windlass. The bales were placed in the cage and then it was allowed to run with its own momentum to the lower side, where the bullock-waggons stood waiting. The rope was wound up again by the windlass, ready to receive the next load. My father was standing by the windlass, taking notes of the weights and markings of each bale, when one bale slipped and threatened to roll into the river below. He threw the bale hook in his hand into it and managed to save it — he was a man of great strength — but in the effort he evidently strained his heart. The men who were with him reported that he went down to the river and sat there for a long time drinking the water. They went home in the dray and he followed slowly, leading his horse. He went straight to bed, and in the morning was found dead there by my sister. The doctors said that he had bled internally.
What happened to his family is a story which grew even more familiar during the next decade. The mortgagees foreclosed and put Ben Ohau up to auction. The price failed to realise the amount of the mortgage, so that the widow got nothing at all out of it, not even the furniture or her own horse, Belfast, that seemed to us almost one of the family. My mother always considered the transaction fraudulent and the auction a hole-and-corner job. For years she kept the papers connected with it, in the hope that my brother, when he came to manhood, might contest the case and perhaps retrieve something.
A child of nine can hardly be said to know its parents, yet everything I can recall of my father was kindly and endearing. A huge, red-headed Yorkshireman of immense
He shared the early settlers' wistful longing for the sights and sounds of Home. Once, when my parents were walking along a Timaru suburban road, children at feet, my father suddenly let out a joyful yell, seized his hat, and, pointing with it to the sky, shouted, ‘There! See! There it is! Hurrah!’ and, running a few steps forward, he turned a somersault. He had heard and seen the first English skylark.
I may make a guess that my father was a poor manager of money. Most of my family are.
My mother went back to the station leaving me, not at boarding-school as had been intended, but to live with a family called Granger, where there were six children, including two golden-haired, blue-eyed little girls, as pretty as cherubs and about my own age. With these I was to attend the new High School soon to be opened in Timaru, for my mother approved strongly of the new idea that girls should, like boys, be educated for a career.
Mrs Granger was a beautiful, stately, cultured woman with a gracious manner. Mr Granger was also handsome and benevolent-looking, and they both were truly religious — religious to a degree I have never known since. They seamed to live constant communion with Jesus. They spoke as if He were in the house and taking an active interest in all the family doings. Though there were seven children in the house, it was most perfectly ordered. ‘One must always behave and keep everything in the home in such a way that, if the Lord were to return to earth this day, He would find that we were awaiting Him.’ They — and all of us — lived in daily expectation of the Second Coming. So much so that, when Mr George Grey-Russell came to dinner
I think the only scriptural precept that was not in daily practice in that family was Solomon's injunction, ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child’. This terrible offence gave Mr Granger a God-given opportunity to obey with much solemnity this commandment too. It was an epoch-making incident, the sensation of the nursery for the year. That was the only lapse from sanctity committed in the family.
After all, they were logical. If we really believed in the imminence of the Second Coming, how else should we behave? Even self-interest would prompt us to be ready and waiting for the good rather than the evil doom. But all we do is to sing fervently —
‘Were the whole realm of nature mine That were an offering far too small. Love so amazing, so divine Demands my life, my soul, my all.’
Once I committed the great wickedness of writing a story and reading it to the girls. Did I not know that inventing a story that was not true was just telling lies, a thing Jesus
Yet, for all this piety, the Grangers were not self-righteous. When revivalists,
The year I lived with the Grangers must have been a particularly tragic one for my mother. She stayed on at the station expecting that the final settlement would make some provision for her. The mortgagees put on a manager whom she disliked intensely —a young pup with swelled head, she called him — and she soon found that, in her own home, where her slightest whim had taken priority over everything else, the very servants were not under her jurisdiction. The manager took my father's splendid horse, rode it from Timaru in one day, and foundered it. He lent her horse Belfast, which had never carried anyone but herself, to the men as a station hack, and finally he determined to go to the Oamaru races and take the whole staff of household servants. These were the Yorkshire family of whom I spoke. They were leaving, and he proposed to bring back a married couple. To go to Oamaru, it was necessary to ford the
After that, realising that there was nothing to salvage, the widow came to settle in town with her young children, full of hope and confidence that she would be able to make a home and a livelihood for us all. She was twenty-eight, and her youngest child was not quite three.
Chapter2
Widowhood in The 'Eighties
In Timaru I was as despondent and miserable as a healthy child of ten can be. I had been told impressively the awful fact that we were now to be poor. To me, ‘poor’ meant low-down, dirty, disreputable, a taker of other people's leavings. Moreover, I had seen my mother washing clothes, and, as things seen are mightier than things heard, the sight had shocked me where I lived. I may say that I never saw her do such a thing either before or afterwards. That once was enough to convince me that our case was indeed desperate. When we had come to town and had taken a very meagre little cottage, I was so impressed by our altered circumstances that I slunk along, hardly daring to take my share of the footpath. On one occasion I was sent to order the week's groceries. Sugar was on the list, quantity unstated. I thought it out. Sugar was, of course, a luxury. It would be dreadful if I should ruin the family prospects by ordering too much, so I ordered a quarter of a pound. The grocer gave it to me in a screw-bag of newspaper in my hand. I was so humiliated that I nearly wept on the spot. I have no doubt that a lesson on restricted means was necessary, for country children do not learn early that shops are full of desirable things that they may not have, but obviously I had been told too much or too little about this poverty.
Though my mother was very confident about the future, how to begin earning was a problem. She took an inventory of the items of her equipment and decided that the two things she could do better than the average were to dance and to make toffee. ‘She had been educated at one of Melbourne's ‘ladies'’ schools and despised what she learned
She considered starting a boarding-school with my father's life insurance as capital, but the Sacred Heart convent was already giving good education of the sort then demanded; the new High School was beginning to offer an academic teaching, and there were two good boarding-schools in Christchurch.
The most popular of these amongst the girls was kept by a Mrs Gibson, but parents who believed in strict discipline sent their daughters to a dragon called Miss Louzer. Her name alone was sufficient threat to quell rebellious or difficult girls. She was said to be a Prussian aristocrat and was a highly educated woman. Her pupils, when they left, had not merely been exposed to French and German, but spoke and wrote both fluently — were properly ‘finished’, to use the phrase of the hour. She never lacked pupils, were they never so unwilling.
My mother shrank from risking her small capital in competition with such schools. What, then, happened to a widow left penniless in those high and far-off times? Their
No doubt we were hard up, and knew it, but, looking back, it seems to me that we were able to have most of the small things that our school-mates had. There was a fashion for tinographs, little photographs on tin the size of a penny stamp. They cost two shillings a dozen and you exchanged them with all your friends. To be in funds on the exchange, you needed about three dozen. Then there was also a fashion for silver jewellery. Gold suddenly became in our eyes common and vulgar. We desired, above all things, a large silver locket, on a thick silver chain. You put somebody's hair in it and made a great mystery of whose it was. Your friends peered and tried to guess which boy of your acquaintance had hair like that. It was probably your brother's or sister's and all the secrecy a silly little pretence.
Before the ubiquitous film became the sole entertainment, many little shows came round — glass-blowers, ventriloquists, jugglers, waxworks, and once a model of the Strasburg clock.
From the number of these small amusements to which
Her friends were wonderfully good to her. They never allowed her to drop out entirely from the gay, the very gay, social life of Timaru. She wore black always, and very severe and meagre mourning it was, yet the lack of suitable attire never seemed to trouble either her or her hostesses. It was not so with me or with my sister. We allowed an inferiority complex to make us shy. We were invited to big parties given by her friends, but went reluctantly, and gradually dropped the small, every-day intimacies with most of her friends' children. Grasmere, the beautiful home of a very beautiful woman, was always open to us. I believe that there is not an orchard and garden in New Zealand to-day to compare with those of Grasmere. In the orchard was every fruit suited to the climate, and all grew in great profusion. I never remember that there were any restrictions or any forbidden trees. Perhaps it was just as well, for the Whites were a large and unruly family and I can't imagine that they would have respected such restrictions. It was a wonderful thing during those hard years to have the freedom of that home. Did I long for flowers for a school occasion? I had only to go to Grasmere and most choice ones were sure to be given me. I may mention that the flower-garden was not free to all, but Mrs White was particularly generous and thoughtful. ‘Would you like some flowers?’ came to her lips as naturally as a smile.
The Whites had a carriage, ‘the real Mackay’, the kind we associate with
When the depression was sore in the land and there was desperate need of retrenchment, the Whites gave up the carriage, as well as most of the luxuries they had been used to, and thus, while the stately homes round Timaru were falling one by one into the hands of mortgagees, they were able to save theirs, with its beautiful grounds and garden.
I am sure the Ostlers must have been intolerable nuisances to the Whites. I was told some years later of an occasion when my small brother, aged six, had killed three of the Grasmere ducks, but with great consideration the thing was kept from my mother. Greater tact hath no man.
Over those six years of Timaru school life let me draw a curtain. I was not studious, diligent and helpful, but wild and ridiculous. Not all the time, certainly, but more often than not. At one stage, I longed to be thought mad, and went roaring round the school grounds in strange, flowing garments. My cup of happiness was full when my sister told me that the girls were asking, ‘Is your sister off her head?’ Such phases were mercifully short. I had not very good health, and you know when the Devil was ill how he changed.
Once I had a lingering cough, by the exercise of which I could call up an appalling deep bark in the schoolroom. Very satisfactory! Perhaps less so to the mistress. We were exceedingly religious at that time. No! Having known the Grangers I should rather say that we all kept a pocket of religious sentiment tucked away in our make-up. A friend wrote me a note: ‘I hope, dear Nell, that you are prepared for the next world, for I know by your cough, which is just
Uncle Tom then), beautiful, touching farewells, precious last words. I arranged to distribute my small possessions, and every day I redistributed them among my favourites. I planned who was to be asked to the funeral and enlarged the list from time to time. I saw my friends gathered round my bed, weeping and wishing that they had seen my fine qualities earlier; my mother, somewhere in the background, also wondering why she had not recognised my virtues. Glorious! Nothing could be better. Was I morbid or finding life too bitter? Not a bit of it. I simply desired the glamour of a funeral over which I imagined myself floating, invisible, as a beautiful angel. But somehow I seemed to get no nearer my goal. Even the cough refused to make so much noise and took more effort to produce. I feared that the consumption, which was the right disease for good little girls to die of, was deserting me. I must do something drastic about it. I would open my bedroom window at night. That was equivalent to suicide. All windows, I knew, must be closed at four o'clock, to prevent the deadly night air from entering the house. I had often seen housewives rushing home in great anxiety in case the maids had forgotten to close the windows. I opened mine and dragged my bed under it. No result! In a final effort, I even sprinkled my sheets with water. It was cruelly uncomfortable, but all in vain. I grew steadily better, forgot about funerals, and have never had a chest complaint since, nor, after that experience, have I ever been afraid of draughts, damp clothes and wet grass. It is universally held that these things bring colds and rheumatism. I can only say that it is not so with me. I catch colds from time to time, like everybody else, but have never been able to trace a cold to anything but infection or perhaps disordered metabolism. The fact that in the Arctic regions a man may have his clothes frozen on to his skin,
There was one incident that has been remembered by my friends as a wild escapade, and a sign of an unruly disposition, but to my own mind was a very natural experiment.
I suppose that every child has longed to fly, has looked at the ease of a bird's flight and wondered why its own body was so heavily chained to the earth. I was no exception, and also I was told a story the truth of which I had no reason to doubt. It was of two English boys who climbed to rob starlings' nests. They found that they could only get to the nests by putting a board out of a narrow slit in the belfry walls, one holding it straight while the other climbed out on it. The boy standing on the board secured seven half-grown starlings. Then they quarrelled over the division of the spoil. ‘If you don't share fair, I'll let you down,’ threatened the one inside. Finally, he did let the board go, and the boy on it fell. However, he was wearing a smock of tight-woven cotton. His hands were held high, and both full of fluttering birds. The smock spread like a parachute and he landed safely, saying, ‘Now you'll get nought.’
I believed the story. Why, then, should I not do the same with two umbrellas? I found two in the hall, put the catches of both out of action in case they should shut at a critical moment, climbed on the roof of a shed and, in sight of two disciples, whose turn was to come next, I hoisted the umbrellas and jumped off.
Nothing was broken but the umbrellas. The fall was painful, but things were more painful when the matter of the broken umbrellas was discovered. No! I was not a dutiful daughter, nor one to ease the conditions of a mother with three children to bring up by herself. I took her virtues
I have noticed that the sons of widows have a tendency to turn out well. I suppose that a youth who is tempted to sow wild oats round, his first start may look to his father to give him a second, but the widow's sons have not only been brought up to feel protectors, which is good for a male's soul, but they know there is no possibility of a rescuing hand. But daughters of widows used not to be so conspicuously successful. A girl's duty in those times was to marry —to marry well. Frequently girls remained single. Look round to-day among the elderly spinsters. You will see that most of them are daughters of widows or of fathers who were failures.
Chapter3
A Great Tragedy Seen from Below
At the age of fifteen, though absurdly ignorant, I considered myself nearly grown-up. Had not girls of my acquaintance married at sixteen? I was never a great reader but I absorbed what I read and books have always made a lasting impression upon me. Thus, such surreptitious fiction as I had picked up, dealing mostly in crime, murder, abductions and mysterious disappearances, led me to picture life overflowing with these excitements. That is probably why, when I found myself in contact with a great criminal sensation (often said to be the greatest New Zealand has known) I was not obsessed, nor frightened by the horror and tragedy of it but took it casually and as an earnest of the sort of thing life was sure to bring to me. This sensation was nothing less than a murder — and an attempted murder — in the fashionable world; and it was my fate to know the murderer well and his victims even better.
Neither in temperament nor in circumstances was I the type of girl to whom such experiences might be expected to fall. Shy, quiet, slow of thought and painfully aware of my own deficiencies, I was content with, or at least reconciled to, the role of observer, taking a worm's-eye view of the great drama unfolded to me, a role for which my very defects fitted me. A dull, dreamy, absent-minded onlooker may be allowed to see points in the game which are deliberately hidden from a brighter, more sharp-witted gaze.
When my father arrived in New Zealand in 1857 he met in Christchurch a young man about his own age who came, as he did, from the Yorkshire wolds. Both took up sheep country in South Canterbury and no doubt saw a good deal of each other in Timaru, the natural seaport town of that district.
Mr T. W. Hall must either have left his station to a manager, or have sold it, for as long as I can remember he lived with his family on a farmlet some three miles north of Timaru. As far back as 1876 I was taken as a small child to visit the Halls. All four sons were at home. They seemed to me to be very big boys and one of them put me on a pony and led me about for a few minutes, but I was not old enough to distinguish one from the other. I sensed that day that the friendship between my father and Mr Hall, though of long standing, was not particularly cordial, for when, on the way home, I said something disparaging of the ‘old man who wanted me to slither downstairs’, I felt at once that it pleased my parents. With a child's instinct to play up to and say what is acceptable, I remember repeating the remark several times, though it is very unlikely that I really disliked the old gentleman who encouraged an amusement so suited to my tastes.
In the early 'eighties, the Halls seem to have fallen on obscure days, but when Tom, the third son, grew up it soon became clear that he had no intention of sharing the family obscurity.
He was good-looking, dark, slightly built and of medium height. (The photographs of
His family could be no help to him but his uncle,
Tom's manner was cordial and most attractive. It was said — and young as I was, I was able to notice it — that when he came into a room everyone in it seemed the
He managed one of his uncle's stations in the Mackenzie Country and later an important commercial concern in Timaru. These activities provided him with another useful social asset, a familiarity with both town and country. Notwithstanding his popularity, most men put a query to his name in the matter of stability and trustworthiness. But that happens to many a young man who makes a splash in a small town.
Women responded all too readily to his attraction but knew him for a wily bird. He flirted with everyone attractive, especially debutantes. Many a married woman would, in after years, whisper the confidence, half in horror, half in pride, ‘I was engaged to
It was probably the latter — for he seemed to slip out of all his affairs uncompromised.
As illustrative of his resourcefulness a story was told that at a certain festivity, where something stronger than claret-cup had circulated, he proposed — actually proposed — to the prettiest of the three pretty H — sisters. When he saw the girl speaking excitedly to her mother he realised what he had done. The H — s were not a family to be trifled with. He promptly danced with the other two sisters in turn and proposed to each of them. So that scarcely had pretty little Rose confided to her mother that
* * * *
It was early in '85 when my mother came home from a
confidante. I seldom commented and never questioned. Such parts of the story as I was unable to understand I supplied later from my own imagination. My silence may have been the reason why my mother could — and did — forget that she had ever confided in me. This time she was explosive.
‘
I have already mentioned Kitty. She was the younger of
The elder daughter had already married a Mr Newton, a farmer. Kitty, the younger, kept house for her step-father at Woodlands, a large house on the outskirts of Timaru with extensive grounds and a splendid orchard.
Knowing that the old man had been a sea captain may have led me to discern in the house a peculiar resemblance to a ship. It was solidly built, with high studs and a high-pitched roof which gave it a four-square-to-all-weathers appearance. But it was inside that the resemblance to a ship was most striking. The massive doors were hung with portières of heavy red brocade. The tall, narrow windows were curtained with the same material bordered with thick red and gold gimp and looped towards the bottom with cord finished with tassels each as large as a tennis ball. The
In my time the carpets had grown a trifle shabby, but they were thick and soft, from wall to wall, and were often overlaid with heavy rugs. Draughts were entirely excluded, and the whole house gave the impression of being able to withstand Arctic storms. There was a stairway which, though fairly handsome, somehow reminded one of a companionway. At one time there had been four rooms upstairs but some primitive alterations — by boarding off the remaining space to serve as an attic — had reduced them to two. There was apparently no entrance to this attic, but once, when I was very young, I had poked inquisitive fingers into the uneven wall and found papered over, inside a built-in wardrobe, a small door leading into it.
I told Kitty of my find and she gave me leave to go and rummage in there to my heart's content. ‘But, don't ask me to go in there’; she added with a little shiver that to me suggested nameless horrors. I wished I had never found that door.
This was just before my father's death, for both my parents were at Woodlands and my father, whose chief desire for his children was that they should fear nothing, took me into the attic. It was an eery place lighted by two small windows that had been boarded up roughly, and let in only slanting rays full of dancing dust specks. It was crowded with lumber, broken furniture, harness, saddles, hats, or parts of them, sea chests, travelling trunks, heavy gilt picture-frames and portmanteaux stiff with age. He laboured to convince me that there was nothing to fear and that probably Kitty was frightened of rats or spiders, stupid things of which I was of course far too sensible to be afraid.
This Kitty was a pleasant, plump, generous girl of twenty-four or twenty-five. She was, as I knew later, indolent, happy-go-lucky, inefficient, dowdy, untidy. If somebody's hair came down it was sure to be hers. Ignominious accidents followed in her train; portions of her clothing came unhitched, her hats blew away. She was not a bad horse-woman, but if she took a toss there was sure to be a handy puddle to make things ridiculous. She laughed and giggled over everything, was never put out whether it was her own fault or someone else's. I remember an occasion (it must have been one of those children's parties where grown-ups help to amuse the youngest of the children for a short time and then take the floor with avidity themselves) when Kitty had forgotten her dancing-shoes. Her own boots (we wore long buttoned or laced boots) were wet, so she danced in a pair of men's slippers which kept falling off and skating across the room to the accompaniment of peals of laughter from Kitty. Sitting round the wall I heard the older women making disparaging remarks and jeering scornfully. I resented their talk hotly, for Kitty was sweet to me, and I had adopted her as a relation and called her
In the house she was hopeless without a maid and absolutely dependent upon one; but she was tolerant and kindly and usually managed to keep good and devoted servants. Once when she was without one I heard her say, ‘What! Make my bed when I have no help? Not I! It is all too comfortable to drag myself out of in the morning.
* * * *
I have still to explain the words — ‘If I don't come out of this affair of Tate's with £200 …’. mana all his own.
One day the news went round that
To the horror of the town his affairs were found to be in
It was a shattering blow to
Tom Hall evidently did not ‘come out of this affair of Tate's’ with his £200, for in less than six months I heard in church the banns read out of
It is probable that my mother remonstrated with Kitty and tried to dissuade her. On the other hand it may have been clear to Kitty that her friend Mrs Ostler disliked her fiancé. At any rate there seemed to be a coolness between my mother and Kitty, for I saw less of my adopted aunt.
After the Halls were married, they went to live about four miles out of Timaru, in one of the many beautiful semi-country houses built in the flourishing 'sixties by people who later found they could no longer afford to live in them.
Tom effected a great change in Kitty. She lost all sign of dowdiness and careless dress. As his wife she became smart, held herself well, dressed well and even developed a waist. She sat upright in his dashing dog-cart and appeared not too scared of his spirited tandem team. I was at school in Dunedin when a Timaru girl wrote to me — ‘You should have seen Mr and Mrs Hall come into the theatre last night. She wore black velvet and she really has a very good figure now her dresses fit. Everyone was turning round to see them come in. Of course he always looks well in evening dress!’
Captain Cain lived on at Woodlands, cared for by a
I had read of locked diaries — girls in novels often had them — and I always had an ardent longing for one. About two years earlier a school friend and I were walking on the beach discussing a wonderful book we meant to write some day. We decided that what we needed for a rich fund of material was a diary in which to record all the exciting things that happened. But neither of us had money wherewith to buy the very cheapest diary. There had been an exceptional storm the night before and great piles of mussels entwined in kelp littered the beach. Couldn't we make some money by selling those mussels? We had heard that they were good for food. We went home and without being observed managed to drag out some strange clothes from boxes — sun-bonnets among other things. We put them on, fondly imagining that we had disguised ourselves, for the venture would have met with no favour in either of our homes. Then we filled bags and baskets with the shell-fish and hawked them from door to door in the poorer streets.
One woman bought four pen'orth and another said, ‘If they was cockles I'd 'ave 'em’. At every other house we met blank refusal. So that fourpence proved our total takings, and that came to a bad end for my friend's younger sister had followed us and made us deliver up the fourpence to her as hush money. My friend is dead but the sister still lives and she and I laughed over the escapade the last time we met.
Staying at Woodlands the lost dream returned. A locked
One day my mother said to me, ‘I have been to see Kitty to-day. She tells me that Tom has insured her life for six thousand pounds. She explained that the insurance would help him in financing his various deals. But I don't like it. I don't like it a little bit.’
I don't know what I answered. Perhaps I didn't even seem to hear, but the words shot an idea into my fanciful mind that never left it.
The next time I stayed at Woodlands and had the leisure to write up my diary, I entered these facts with additions of my own. I made a story of it — supplying my own details — of Tom's urgent need for money, of his decision (much against the grain) to marry Kitty. In my version there was a wicked and very beautiful lady with whom he was fascinated and I wrote at some length of the cunning way in which he persuaded his wife to make her will in his favour.
The story was, of course, prompted by my mother's vague suspicions, but strangely enough she seemed to have forgotten the fact that she had voiced them to me. She afterwards said she was sure she had never mentioned such a thing to me. She seems even to have forgotten that such suspicions had crossed her mind. Poisoning, I am sure, never entered mine. I was planning to finish the story in a boat far out at sea where the wife should be callously pushed overboard, but the thing was never finished. I am sure also that it never occurred to me that anyone ought to do anything to prevent whatever horror was to take place. It was a tale already told, inevitable and not to be altered by human agency. Perhaps I only half believed it. It is hard to understand that I wrote so much and yet never spoke to anyone about the matter.
There were other fancies and romances about Timaru people in the fatal book. There had been the case of a
And all the time, as I invented a mixture of nonsense and crime, a ghastly tragedy was being enacted day by day under my very nose.
‘Oh, Tom,’ the poor old man would say, ‘that new rum is as bad as the whisky. I've been sick every time I took it.’
‘That's bad! I am disappointed … made sure that special rum would fix you. We'll try another brand of whisky, eh Dad?’
The new brand would be delivered and opened by the housekeeper. The next day the old man would cry joyfully, ‘Tom, it's grand … first-class stuff you sent. I'm as right as a trivet. Order me a case.’
But next day — ‘No good, Tom. Bad as ever … sick as a dog…. Can't make it out. Can't make it out.’
Now, I had been brought up to believe that all alcohol is poison. My mother's father had been one of twelve clergymen in Liverpool who thought that they would exercise more influence over their poorer parishioners if they could persuade them not to ‘drink the first glass’ and, in order the better to point the lesson, they pledged themselves to total abstinence. One of their number was a stutterer who would describe himself as a tee-tee-total abstainer. Thus the word ‘teetotaller’.
This grandfather of mine must have been a temperance fanatic at a time when anti-alcoholic movements were unborn or in their infancy. He received an appointment to Melbourne, at a gold-rush settlement known as Canvastown. He landed there with his wife and eleven children to make, no doubt, Mrs Partington's efforts to stem the tide of strong drink there. Melbourne grew apace and soon became a diocese, and was expecting a Bishop to be sent out from Home. My mother could remember the making of many little white dresses and the boiling up of little white socks for the great occasion of the Bishop's arrival, for Papa's importance as the earliest arrival entitled him to make the welcoming speech.
It may have been a very good speech but it was not calculated to advance the ambitions of his family.
What Papa said was that he considered that it would have been an immense benefit to Melbourne if his Lordship the Bishop had been a teetotaler.
Walking home, his little wife, who was naturally cherishing visions of promotion — to Ballarat or elsewhere — said, ‘Oh, Thomas! Why did you say that?’
‘My dear, we are told to speak in season and out of season.’
‘It was certainly out of season this time,’ sighed the little wife.
I would not like to be certain that the retort was not hatched up afterwards according to the ways of family stories, but it seems to me that a sensible wife — as she was reported to be — having a husband with such a devastating honesty of purpose, would have acquainted herself beforehand with what he intended to say.
However, he must have had qualities more forceful than tactlessness for all his children seem to have espoused his doctrines. Even my mother, by no means a docile disciple of any cause, was a rabid teetotaller. During her married life she graciously offered whisky to my father's guests and
* * * *
So, pondering on
‘What! An old salt live without rum? Spirits disagree with a sailor? That's a good joke. No ship's ever been known to go to sea without grog.’ In short, explosive sentences, he described the quantities of rum he and every seaman habitually consumed, ‘and never did anyone a spot of harm’, he ended. ‘But this business is queer, queer, damned queer!’
What was queer was that
I am not sure of his age, but he was not failing in mind or, until this sickness, in body. He was short, broad and hairy, bluff and cordial and noted for his hearty laugh. I understood that he was very popular among men. Every morning, until his sickness made it impossible, he was driven by the gardener in a low pony carriage to a gathering of his friends in the town.
That Dr McIntyre should not have discovered what accounted for his patient's attacks was later to bewilder all Timaru. The doctor was a rollicking, sociable Irishman whom everybody liked. No one credited him with great medical ability nor with any particular interest in his profession except that it provided him with a very gay life. He and
Dr McIntyre had an extensive practice among the Irish immigrants who, in the good times, had been brought out in large numbers to help build the railways but who were now forming an unemployed section of a community itself daily growing poorer. It was said that he was adored in this submerged tenth and had never been known to charge one of them a penny. He had once been engaged to Kitty and had jilted her, she felt, somewhat callously. I was not told this fact, but once as we came out of church Kitty, who had been sitting with us, said to my mother, ‘How beautifully the Archdeacon spoke about not allowing oneself to harbour a lurking grudge. I have made up my mind from to-day to forgive
The doctor, a bachelor, kept a monkey — a huge creature. It was said that Chimp sat beside him at dinner demanding glass for glass of whatever was being consumed by his master, whose boast it was that Chimp could carry his liquor better than many a gentleman. Sometimes the monkey was chained in the doctor's front garden where we schoolgirls used to give it bits of our lunch or throw mud at it, according to our several natures.
I sometimes wonder whether, if I had not been blinded by an anti-alcoholic obsession, even I might have dropped on the truth of
Once when there were several guests at Woodlands I remember scanning
It was in 1885, at the time that I was seeing so much of
Hearing of Kitty's sickness and convinced that she knew a certain cure for maternal nausea, my mother went out to Kingslake to see her.
I think she would scarcely have walked all the four miles (though it is possible that she did). At least she walked part of the way. The day was hot. She wore black cotton gloves that stained her hands. After talking awhile with Kitty, whom she found looking wretched and suffering much more seriously than she had expected, she said, ‘I must really get this black off my hands. I'll just go to the kitchen and ask Mrs Peters for some tartaric acid.’
She knew Mrs Peters, the Halls' cook. Her daughter had been nursemaid to us for a short time when my father was alive. She was talking to this woman and rubbing the stains with acid when Tom came into the dining-room where Kitty was. Through the open door she heard — as she was intended to — Kitty say, ‘Mrs Ostler is here. She is in the kitchen talking to Mrs Peters.’
He did not wait for the end of the sentence, but burst into the kitchen and, seeing the guest handling white powder, stammered with obvious agitation, ‘What's this? What are you doing? What have you given to Mrs Ostler?’
In a matter of seconds he realised the situation and became himself, indeed he became even more charming than usual. My mother did wonder at his behaviour but decided that his sense of propriety was at first outraged by a guest's invading the kitchen, but that he had then remembered that she had known the cook for years.
She thought no more about it. My mother was never one to lose any sleep about what people thought of her actions. With Mrs Peters it was different. She had seen things that disturbed her. Shortly afterwards those who happened to be interested heard that the Halls had lost their cook; she had been taken to the asylum in Christchurch.
Seven years later when we had moved to the
It seemed that the day after the incident of the tartaric acid, Kitty being in bed, her husband came to the kitchen for a cup of tea for her and insisted on taking it to her himself.
Mrs Peters, who had long been haunted by ugly suspicions, watched and saw her master put a white powder in the tea. With the impetuosity of her kind she flew at him
Instead of turning to Kingslake he drove into Timaru, stopping at
Why she didn't tell her tale to the man, she could not tell. She was too scared that her master might come back. In a short time he returned with the doctor. She didn't remember
Had they given her any drugs?
She was not sure. If Hall had tried to make her swallow anything she would have resisted. She remembered that the
Did she make no effort to be released?
Yes, indeed! But every time she tried to tell any of the nurses it only convinced them that she was not ready for discharge. They wouldn't listen, would just give her some work to do and say she was best not to think. She was sure that she was released at last because she was quiet and cheerful and never mentioned poisoning of wives.
Now this is a fantastic story, entirely unsupported by evidence, unless Mrs Peters' son is still alive to corroborate the tale. All the actors are dead. The reader must decide for himself whether or not to believe it. The amount of cunning, quick thinking and nerve shown by the man, approaches genius — equally remarkable are the lack of initiative and the resignation on the part of the woman. Mrs Peters (as were many old people) may have been illiterate. That would account for her knowing nothing of the Hall case, and why she did not attempt to do anything for herself by letter. Of course, the reader is at liberty to believe that the old woman was really deranged. I only know that she showed no signs of it. When I saw her in the late 'nineties, after I was married, she was running a large boarding-house very efficiently and was in good health both mentally and physically.
It was about this time that I met
I, a girl between fourteen and fifteen, was vastly attracted and flattered by this grown-up person who came to our house and treated me as if I were grown-up too. We went long walks together, for my mother had said that I must not take her to see our friends at first as we did not know her antecedents. ‘She might, you know, be an adventuress.’ I thought that an absurdly narrow-minded attitude, though it was common enough then.
infra dig in any case. The best people, she assured me, had all their requirements sent up for their approval to their homes by their own milliners and dressmakers. So, if they alighted from their carriages sometimes, they were not interested in the shops. No ‘nice’ woman must ever carry her handkerchief in her hand. That was a dreadful thing to do. It might be looked upon as a sign. She was very mysterious about that and said I would know some day. I have never found out yet wherein the harm of this lies. I must never say ‘thank you’ when handed a parcel by a man or woman behind a counter. They must say ‘thank you’, but never the buyer, that is if she is a lady. She told me other things of more practical use which I absorbed eagerly. My mother had an exaggerated contempt for etiquette. She thought a gentlewoman should know instinctively how to behave and, anyway, it was a free country and there was no need to bother about silly restrictions.
Miss Houston was good-looking and extremely stylish. She knew how to wear clothes. She told me tales of her life and her home in England before they lost their money, with much detail about footmen and butlers and other grandeurs which interested me immensely. I did not repeat the stories to my mother. Probably some instinct told me that she might cast doubts on what I wished to believe.
From maturer experience I should imagine that the girls had been maids — possibly ladies' maids — in good homes and, believing that their looks and their wits fitted them for a better position, determined to seek it in a far land. Considering the cast-iron barriers that then divided class from class one can hardly blame them. One of them, at least, did well for herself.
It had been decided that I should go to boarding-school in 1886 and the holidays were filled with preparations. My school books were at Woodlands and I left them there as long as possible. Then, with the precious diaries, I brought them home and placed them at the bottom of a trunk that my mother had half packed with clothes. I hoped the diaries would be safe there. But, as ill luck would have it, my mother was seized with a reorganising spasm and came upon the two precious exercise books filled with what may well have struck her as an unusual form of study. Reading them, she was sure that her daughter must be a lunatic, or else depraved beyond belief. It was small wonder, for the subjects dealt with, and the words used (neither of which meant much to the said daughter) shocked her to the core. Moreover, while I had described in detail the actions and motives of the semi-fictional characters, my own actions were merely hinted at and left alarmingly vague. ‘The awful question I had asked
At last,
Though these confessions were utterly absurd and quite a storm in a teapot I shall relate them later. The diaries were never restored to me nor had I the pluck to ask for them. I was packed off to school in Dunedin.
* * * *
Poor old
A bleak prospect, I thought, for I had stayed on that farm both in summer and in winter. It was a perfect farm. Rich, rolling downs with limestone outcrops and, during the summer holidays when I first stayed there, I thought it was fairyland. The abundance and lavishness of every good thing was almost distressing. Cherries, early peaches, apricots rotted on the ground. Strawberries and raspberries grew wild, and could be found in considerable quantity. Apple trees were laden to breaking-point. Huge pans of milk stood in rows in the dairy yielding cream like yellow leather — sweet and thick — and no one said, ‘Don't break the pan’, when cream was wanted. There were ponies and the bustle and activity of farm life — everything a child considers heaven. I enjoyed it so much that Mrs Newton asked me
Mr Newton was an Englishman of good family whose pose it was to appear rougher and more uncouth than any pioneer colonial could ever have been supposed to be. Men liked him well and said he was ‘the decentest sort’, but he was no lady's man. To women he was often rude and particularly so to his wife. Mrs Newton disliked the country and was obviously unhappy. This was not surprising, for the comfort and plenty of the country depend upon the farmers knowing how to provide it. Besides, her husband was often deliberately brutal. Once when he had shut the door with a bang, she cried out her nerves could not endure such noise. Thereupon he banged it again several times. I thought him a great, coarse monster of whom I was scared stiff, though I remember that he never failed to have a pony saddled for me whenever the weather suggested a ride.
Long before they became brothers-in-law ‘the Lord had put enmity’ between
Tom despised the man who had married Kitty's elder sister as a lout and a fool. He called him ‘the gorilla’. Billy sensed the insincerity behind Tom's fine manners and immaculate appearance and at the sight of him was consumed with wrath. Poor Mrs Newton, after Kitty's marriage, used quite openly to envy her sister her attentive, charming and considerate husband.
Miss Houston was never obliged to go out to ‘Misery Farm’. As soon as
* * * *
I saw Kitty for the last time in July, 1886, when I came home for the winter holidays.
The emaciated object I was shown on the bed shocked and, I think, frightened me. I grew shy and found nothing to say. She tried to talk but gasped that she felt as if someone had hands round her throat and was choking her. I asked timidly if she had much pain. She said she could bear the pain if the other symptoms would leave her. She did not say what they were and I refrained from asking. Mrs Ellison, the maternity nurse, described them — not to me — ‘It's itching and twitching she is all day and all the night.’
She certainly looked appalling. Not only unlike herself but unlike a human being. I had never seen death or even serious illness. If, I thought, there could be a stage worse than this it must indeed be horrible. Yet she lived and grew worse, enduring it all for nearly three more weeks.
I went again to the sick-room, saw the baby, was told his name was to be Nigel. Kitty said, ‘You must come to the christening. It is to be as soon as I am better.’
This must have been July. I saw neither of them again. One of the maids walked home with me as was expected if any household invited a woman or a child to stay after dark.
* * * *
Some three or four weeks earlier when my mother had ‘called on the baby’, Kitty had looked fresh and well.
Kitty, as she was chatting, said, ‘Oh! I had such a narrow escape last week. It was my first day up. I was sitting just here, close to the window, when Tom brought in the step-ladder and climbed up to fix something about the curtains. He was working up there and the whole heavy curtain-pole fell down with a bang. If I hadn't just that moment moved slightly to look at what he was doing, I should have been killed. It fell on the side of my chair and smashed it to bits. I am all black bruises down the side where the rings hit me. You know how heavy those poles are.’
My mother did know and always said that suspicion first crossed her mind at that moment. She felt sure that no man, unless he meant mischief, could have loosened the supports of those prodigious poles while someone sat beneath. Though the incident might not have roused her conscious suspicion, it must have lurked for some time in her mind. How else could she have imprinted it on mine?
Kitty grew rapidly worse and my mother's suspicions, once aroused, extended and became a torment. She must do something. She went to Mr White who was Crown Prosecutor and a friend. He was horrified that she should say such things and greatly concerned lest she should get herself into serious trouble. Yes, he knew that there were rumours that
* * * *
There was a small gathering one afternoon at Woodlands.
My mother was not at Woodlands that day but she heard of the little incident and it revived her urge to do something. She spoke to a policeman. She asked him merely what action the police would take in circumstances such as a strong suspicion that a man was poisoning his wife. The man stared at her stupidly and after some questioning seemed to think there was nothing that the police could do. She saw there was no help there. Then she went to the Inspector of Police, who impressed her as a trustworthy person, and she told him the tale. He was obviously sceptical but promised to see
Dr McIntyre, though he was afterwards given much praise for detecting the crime, was, in truth, strangely slow to act. It evidently did not come to him in a flash that poison was the cause of his patient's condition, even after it had been suggested to him. He did, though tardily, give the nurse orders that no food should be given to Mrs Hall and that the iced water, that was a necessity to allay her thirst, was to be carefully covered and kept in her charge.
If Tom Hall had been wise he would have taken these mild precautions as a warning, and would have desisted, at least for a time, but he was a hunted man and dare not be wise. It was later proved that he was financially in deep water. He had forged over a period of years, forged again to hide his forgeries, backing one false document with another.
The holidays were over and we were on our way to the boat that was to take me back to school when my mother suddenly blurted out her suspicions and mentioned the ugly word, poison. She was agitated, and warned me several
I must now depart from those things I saw and knew and give what is common knowledge in order to finish the tragedy.
The man who could not afford to be wise acted, as desperate men do, with extraordinary daring. He came into the sick-room with a bottle of spirits, saying, ‘Here's the brandy to put in the beef-tea injection.’
The bottle was produced in Court and found to contain a quantity of poison.
The iced water he was not able to handle as the nurse had promised to administer it herself, but he brought a cup, saying that the patient was intolerably thirsty, and the nurse poured the water into it and gave it herself as she had been told. It was afterwards found that he had already put the white powderNote: Antimony is a cumulative poison. That is to say, it remains in the body, each dose adding its effect to the last, till there is sufficient to cause death. The sickness, though distressing, is not the fatal symptom.
This was his undoing.
Kitty drank as thirsty people do but said, ‘It's nasty. It's bitter.’
The overdose had the effect of making Kitty violently sick. She vomited unceasingly all night, almost dying of the straining. This, according to medical testimony, cleared the body of some of the poison, and thus saved her life.
No one could have been more attentive to a sick wife than
Dr McIntyre also sent a specimen of the patient's vomit to
At half-past eight on the night of 15 August four policemen, headed by the Inspector, approached Woodlands. One went to the back door, one to the french window leading from Kitty's room and two came to the front door and knocked.
Tom and
It was said that the shock silenced the man but the woman chirped up gaily, ‘Antimony? Isn't that the stuff you use in your photography?’
Then the man recovered and explained, no doubt most plausibly, that there had been some curious mistake; that it was true that he had been buying antimony in large quantities … he used it for his asthma, smoked it in his cigarettes — had done so for years. He was at a loss to understand….
As he talked he edged towards the fireplace and now thrust his hands into his pockets, intending to throw their contents into the fire. The Inspector ordered him to take them out and showed himself ready to enforce the order. Tom fell back as if fainting and gasped for brandy.
Before the arrested man could do more than wrench the cork off and spill the contents of a bottle in one pocket and tear the paper that contained a white powder in the other pocket, the four policemen were in the room and resistance clearly useless.
On the way to the police station Tom was utterly broken and seemed unnerved, but
Although the usual warning was given them by the
Some people consider this speech the spark of decency that flickers somewhere in the worst of human beings; others declare that he was not himself, had not recovered from the shock, that he had no redeeming spark.
While retained in the Timaru gaol awaiting the first enquiries,
It would be impossible to exaggerate the excitement, the frenzy that seized the people of Timaru. The town was just small enough to allow almost everyone to have known, seen, spoken to or become in some way personally interested in at least one of the actors in the great drama. The wildest tales found credence. Both prisoners had committed suicide; both had escaped with the assistance of a band of armed men; orders had come from Wellington that the prisoners were to be allowed bail; the Government would certainly take a hand and disallow the charge. Nothing was too crazy to be believed.
Exciting details soon followed. The police search of Woodlands had revealed Kitty's will, making all she possessed over to her husband, and Taylor on Poisons beside it among the prisoner's possessions. The attic was also found to contain bundles of inflammable material that had lately been carried there — wood and straw, tins of kerosene and even rags already soaked in kerosene. At every street corner the story was constructed. If the patient had died according to schedule on the night of the 15th the house could — and no doubt would — have gone up in flames the same night. It
Truly Dr McIntyre had brought himself to order the arrest just in time, for it was obvious that his patient could not have lived through another daring attempt to administer antimony.
And, if the long-laid scheme had not miscarried — if the victim had died according to schedule on the 15th and the house and all evidence of the crime had disappeared — what, one wonders, would have been the fate of the baby, the son of that disastrous union, little
It was after the trial that some evidence came out which throws light on this conjecture. In 1884, shortly after
The solicitor gave the opinion required, explaining that the widower of the deceased woman would be better off in case of there being surviving issue because as guardian he would have the use of the money during the minority.
In face of this, can we dare to conclude that Kitty was allowed to live until her child was born in order that the child's father, as guardian, might have the use of money?
This last disclosure was to Timaru the head and front of
Kitty absolutely refused to believe in her husband's guilt.
The belief that he would be acquitted was universal. Excited and unruly crowds thronged about the Magistrates' Court. ‘He'll get off!’ ‘He carries too many guns!’ ‘He's too clever!’ ‘He'd slip through the fingers of the Devil!’ were among the remarks shouted. There were those who said that he would be lynched if the crowd could lay hands on him.
Following such scepticism there was a burst of joyful surprise when both accused were committed for trial. But the temper of the people had been such that the authorities thought it wise to change the venue and the trial was held in Christchurch. There the scenes were even worse. Madly surging crowds fought to obtain a glimpse of the prisoners. When the rank and file realised that there was to be a fair trial, that even the seats in the Court-room were not all reserved for the great and mighty but that first-comers were to be first served, there was much rejoicing.
One local enthusiast burst into verse:
‘The Magistrate sits on his Bench. That chief from duty does not flinch; Who or whom to him's all one, Justice impartial marks that man. One in ten thousand sits he there The right with justice balance fair.’
There were reams of it. I have the booklet yet, the story of the case in verse, complete with such hideous photographs of the accused as would justify a conviction without a hearing. The epic contains such gems as this:
‘If his wife only in death would wallop Tom would get a mighty dollop.’
The Supreme Court evoked the same surprised delight:
‘There sits Judge Johnson on the Bench And nobly doth it fill, Stern duty, justice, not a flinch, Both mark his iron will.’
What bred, one wonders, these doubts in the minds of so many New Zealanders? Why should they imagine that wealthy and influential criminals were not subject to the law? If the Hall case could be said to do any good at all it was that it helped to shake this rooted distrust, and to prove that British justice, though transplanted to the Antipodes, is still neither to be bought nor intimidated.
The trial is, of course, on record, but, as the average reader does not consult records, I shall touch on some of its main points. There was the accused's desperate financial position and his many forgeries to avoid earlier detection; there was the fact that his commitments must be met by 15 August: there was his wife's will made in his favour and the fact that he had insured her life for six thousand pounds.
A Timaru bookseller gave evidence that he had sold the prisoner the expensive book, Taylor on Poisons. The date of
After eight days in a Court packed to suffocation, the jury brought in a verdict of guilty, and
At boarding-school, letters and papers from Timaru brought me into the limelight, for as well as the absorbing interest taken by everyone, it happened that the school cook had once been cook to
Once the police came to interview me at school. They were concerned about certain things I was supposed to have written in a diary.
I grew shy and told them little, though I was not at all reluctant to be called as a witness at the trial. It seemed, as I learnt later, that my mother, when all the world was discussing the case, could not resist telling a few friends how her schoolgirl daughter had been bright enough to suspect the criminal long ago and had even written her suspicions in a diary. When, however, she discovered that the rumour had reached the ears of the police she recoiled at the idea of a girl in Court at a murder trial and burnt the
I am ashamed now to remember how little I was hurt or distressed about the horror and misery of the whole affair. I was really attached to Kitty, or thought I was. Yet I do not recall suffering with her in her pain, or in the misery of her knowledge that the husband whom she adored, and believed adored her, had married her only in order to poison her.
I wonder if youth is always so lacking in sympathetic understanding.
The trial of
The evidence for the prosecution attempted to show that most of the food and drink taken by the patient had been given and prepared by
Hay's long address to the jury was proclaimed a masterpiece. It was confidently said that had he lived he would have become an ornament to the Bar. He dwelt on the accused's defenceless plight. He drew a touching picture of an unfortunate and innocent lady, a stranger in a strange land, with no kinsman nor even friend to advise or stand beside her. He pointed out how trifling and uncertain the evidence against her had been. If she had removed her
The jury not only acquitted her but added a rider concerning her stainless character.
When the trials were over and the excitement had died down people began to recall that
I was at school in Dunedin and
‘I suppose,’ said Mrs Mackerras to him, ‘that we must not ask you the result of your investigations in the Timaru poisoning case?’
‘And what reason,’ he asked in the challenging tone of a Scotsman, ‘is there that I should nae speak? Ay, indeed, antimony has been found in the buddy in quantity sifficient to cause death.’
So there was to be another trial of
Many who had been
From a cause that these loud protesters could never have guessed, it happened that he did escape hanging and they were able to say, ‘I told you so!’ According to British law then, when a man was on trial for a crime, evidence of his having committed a previous crime was not admissible. It was, of course, the gravamen of this case that
As Tom Hall had been proved an expert forger, it was inevitable that the memory of his late partner,
Nearly twenty years later I went to see the Tates, then living in Greytown. Life was pretty grim for them and had been so for years, but they were as lovable and as hospitable as ever. Cissy, my contemporary, told me many scraps of circumstantial evidence tending to show that her father's
* * * *
In a remarkably short time Kitty had quite recovered. Eventually, of course, she had to believe in the attempted poisoning, but at what stage she succumbed I was not told. My mother saw her once for a short time, but she did not wish to see her old friends and soon took her baby to Christchurch and from there to England.
She lived in London until some time in the 'nineties when she came out here. She stayed in Wellington with Mrs Hudson, who had been our common friend
‘Is Mrs Hall going away?’
‘No,’ said the woman. ‘She died yesterday.’
Tom also spent his last days in London and, unknown to both, not far from Kitty's residence. Sir John Hall, with infinite generosity, had settled an annuity of £200 a year on his disastrous nephew, to be paid from the time of his release from prison until his death, on the condition that he lived out of New Zealand. One would have thought that the condition would have been most acceptable. On the contrary, he was constantly pestering the trustees of the fund to allow him to break the proviso and return here. He supplemented his income by selling photographs and was cared for to the end by a most devoted housekeeper.
Chapter4
Cause and Effect
Timaru, at that period, had many ugly sensations besides the Hall case. In fact, the town was then famous for fraudulent bankruptcies which resulted in disappearances, imprisonments, and suicides. One prominent citizen, always supposed to be very sound financially, was found to have lived on his clients' money for years. He had kept a loaded revolver in his office drawer for over five years, and given strict instructions to his office boy that every visitor's name should be announced before he was admitted. When finally the police, who had come to arrest him, were announced, he found the courage to use the weapon and the police arrived too late. Another took poison and, as an extra precaution, threw himself into deep water. Several did what was then called ‘The Pacific Slope’, ‘blessing the fruitful islands where never warrants come’. (The extradition laws have been tightened since then.) Some, innocent of anything but trusting folly, served terms of imprisonment and came out broken men. The discrepancies in their accounts were often small, in these days of big money almost incredibly so; but the losses usually fell on widows and orphans who ‘pray for ten per cent.’—that is to say, on those who, because their funds are meagre, are deluded into taking risky securities for the sake of high interest.
There was one of these defaulters for whom there was universal sympathy. We were all sure that his trouble was that he had too large a heart. He was generous, not with the officious vanity that must be always giving, but with a genuine and unostentatious desire to help everyone needing help. He would dance with the wall-flowers, though he danced superlatively; he would take neglected chaperones
The fundamental cause of all this trouble and misery must be looked for in these ‘boiling-downs’ I have spoken of on the sheep-stations. Timaru was entirely dependent upon its back country. The harbour, to-day a source of pride and revenue, was then a grievous expense which many people thought would ultimately prove useless. There was an unusual number of agents, brokers' salesmen of one sort and another, who, no doubt, had flourished like the green bay tree in the prosperous times, when land was booming. There is no game so easy and so profitable as ‘milking’ the farmer — so long as he is ‘in milk.’ Now the farming and grazing industries had run dry, or were providing a trickle not enough to support a village.
But this, you will say, hardly accounts for fraud and theft. I believe it sometimes does. Suppose an agent who is not doing quite as well as he had been, but still has nothing to worry about and is sure the fall is temporary, draws, as he has done a hundred times before, fifty pounds from general funds for his legitimate expenses.
He hasn't even asked himself if it is safe, for does not Smith owe him £100, and Brown £200, and neither of them has ever been a day late in payment. But when Smith defaults because Jones has not paid him, and Brown is not able, to pay because Robinson's mortgage on one of the richest stations has turned out so much waste paper, that
Our agent may have assets — valuable properties purchased in good times and looked upon as the nucleus of a fortune. It would be a pity to realise on these just now when the market seems to be slack, so he continues to pay current expenses out of any money available. Soon something happens — perhaps the bankruptcy of some business, thought to be sound — and he grows alarmed. He must, however unprofitably, part with some investment, and set himself straight. But by now the market is not merely flat, it is non-existent. Everyone is trying desperately to realise on his property and investments. Then those ordinary drawings on current accounts are apt to look remarkably like embezzlement, and a perfectly honest man likely to find himself in the dock and even in gaol.
Besides those unfortunates who were guilty of nothing but bad judgment, there were in Timaru a large class of people who deliberately and consistently over-spent. They seemed bent on emulating the wealthy people of Christ-church, for wealth can prosper alike by slumps and by booms. Social climbing was a game played feverishly and in deadly earnest. If I had not lived in Timaru at that time I could never have understood how much social position could count or to what lengths otherwise sensible people would go to obtain it.
We have read accounts of county snobbery in England and of Fifth Avenue excesses in
Nor was this absorption with social life and the overspending incidental upon it confined to the women. It was the men, and often the single men, who refused to retrench and who put up the most gallant fight for this Dead Sea apple.
The Gentlemen's Club (a masculine affair) was expensive and exclusive. Remembering the struggle and the wire-pulling involved in getting elected as a member, surely one ought not to resign at the first breath of bad times. These would surely not last. Then how one would regret it! There was the hunt, too. Could anyone bear to be out of it, though it did demand a good horse as well as other expenses? At that time, most of the families who counted lived out of town on five and ten acre sections. It would be asking too much, especially of their women, to deprive them of any way of getting about. Timaru was noted for smart turn-outs and continued to be so long after the money to keep them up had vanished.
We say to-day that a car keeps a man poor. I believe that horses were responsible for more financial embarrassment. True, an old nag to draw a trap about cost next to nothing; but ‘Horseback Hall’, demanding well-bred mounts, groomed and stabled and constantly renewed, was another matter. Besides, when in normal times a man buys a car, it is a possession and he knows for certain that he can never see his full money again once he has run it on the road. A horse, on the other hand, was something to deal with. In buying a horse for £50 you might reasonably hope, if you fed it, groomed and rode it well, to sell it for £60. Every man considered himself a perfect judge of horseflesh and so entitled to speculate in it. When depressions come
The women held tight to what they had, erected barbed-wire entanglements between the classes and saw to it that no outsider squeezed through. Sometimes les autres were invited to sing or perform at a charity concert and were received most affably, even made much of, but the acquaintances so made seldom ripened.
The qualifications required for inside seats were — and still are — to me a mystery. Neither virtue nor birth was among them. Wealth had little to do with it; those who had lost everything else were not allowed to lose caste. Once an insider, always an insider. Nor had culture; there was more of that commodity outside than in. Long residence was an important factor. Old identities who had no wish to be there remained inside the pale. The barrier was sometimes lifted for amusing people, good sports, especially single men, and of course there are successful social climbers all the world over. The fool's progress proceeded according to precedent — social ambition, over-spending, bankruptcy and sometimes a much uglier finale.
The men were mostly good fellows and it seems wrong to suggest that
Fiction, especially French fiction, is fond of depicting fiends in human form, men devoid of the least spark of decency, devoted ardently to evil. If I had not known the
In later years I have wondered if even a pitiless monster like
Not that there is the least tittle of evidence that he ever harboured such thoughts. During the time Timaru was seething with the excitement of the arrest and of the two trials, every word that
* * * *
The entry in my diary about the ‘dreadful thing I did on the night of the Bamfield's party’ I can now explain though it was in itself so ridiculously childish that, except that it
I was staying at Woodlands, so, in view of the party, I went home after school for my evening regalia, which was (you will hardly believe it) a coloured apron. For school, we wore dark dresses with pinafores, usually white, embroidered or trimmed with a colour. For a party, the fashion of the moment for flappers was a bright-coloured square, pinned on to those same school frocks. The summit, if you could achieve it, was a large coloured silk handkerchief. You pinned one corner with a brooch on the chest, tied two behind with ribbons, the fourth hung down in front. Most of us had to be content with cotton squares, but, if one could compass a hair ribbon to match the apron, that atoned for all deficiencies.
Woodlands, though considered in the country, was not far from the residential area where the Bamfields lived, so my mother was justified in supposing that the hostess would see that someone took me home.
That party was particularly enjoyable and too soon the nurses or fathers began to arrive to collect their charges. I had neither, and no one seemed to be going my way. Now, I have always been perfectly ridiculous about allowing friends to render me small services. Even now, when old age and blindness make these necessary and becoming, I instinctively resent help if I can manage without it. On this occasion I assured them that it was less than five minutes' walk and I needed nobody. They did not acquiesce and there were several offers to take me, but I protested, and cut short the argument by running up the street as fast as I could.
Now, Woodlands had two entrances — one a long drive through thick trees, always avoided at night, and the other, an iron gate near the house. To guard the cherries — which could literally be gathered in clothes-baskets — the Cains kept a dog, reputed to be extraordinarily savage. In the day-time
Loitering, undecided, I realised that all the families in the little residential group were known to me. Most of them had had someone at the party. Surely they had not all been so hasty in retiring. The Hassells' house was dark and as silent as the grave. I raised the knocker and shivered with horror at the noise one tap made in the vast stillness. I simply did not dare to rouse that household. I passed by and looked in at every house in the block. Not a light. The Sims, good friends, I should have courage to wake them. But I hadn't. I sat on their verandah to pull myself together, and think. Of course! Why had I not thought of it? I would go home. We lived at the other side of the town, but that was nothing. The streets were familiar and I was tireless. I started off gaily, half running.
The site on which Timaru is built was originally cleft by a gully through which ran a small creek. An embankment
‘Protestant, Protestant, ring the bell, Catholic, Catholic, go to Hell’,
and then run for their lives. The old girl knew as well as we that she had no chance of catching us, but she would make a feint of chasing and then stop, lift her one garment high over her head, and display herself stark naked to our frightened gaze. I can absolve myself of having ever taken part in this form of amusement, but I had seen the exhibition and been duly horrified.
To-night, approaching the embankment, I saw that Sophia, too, was having a party. A fire was burning in the open, and before it dark figures of men moved and flickered. They seemed to be sailors, and there was some sort of a brawl going on. From the safety of the highly-embanked road, I could look down on this circus, so was not afraid. The brawl grew noisier — oaths, shouts, curses, and the sound of blows, mingled with Sophia's shrill yells. As the donnybrook grew fiercer one man angrily detached himself from the mělée and made for the road. I ran a few steps, but soon realised that he would gain the narrow road before I could get off it. He had blocked my way to home and I turned and ran wildly back to the Bamfields. I did not go into their house. I went to the Sims’, partly because Mrs Sims was the embodiment of motherly kindness. Still I could not bring myself to awaken the household. I sat on the verandah, wondering how long it would be before daylight came. I had entirely lost my nerve, and was trembling with some undefined fear. I was also anxious that it should not
The waning moon rose. It was hardly more than a thread, and, though it made the world lighter, it streaked everything with long black and white lines, strange and ghostly. I kept on waiting for daylight, and for courage to get myself home. At last I heard a step coming up North Street. I tiptoed to the gate and, standing hidden in the shadow of the gatepost, saw what seemed a respectably dressed elderly man. Without stopping to think, I stepped out and stammered, ‘Would you mind taking me home? I live in that house up the road, the one with the drive of trees, and I'm frightened to go through them.’
I had no time to tell him of the other way and the dog. He muttered thickly in broad Scots, with a chuckle, ‘I was thinkin' I h'd me work cut oot to see mesel' hame.’ He lurched and just saved himself with his stick from falling, and then I knew, to my horror, that he was not sober.
He asked no question; said, ‘Come awa' lass.’
Hardly knowing what I did, I walked beside him up the road and down the drive, thanked him hurriedly, and shot, how thankfully, through an ever-open french window into safety.
Nobody saw! Thank goodness, not a soul knew of my night out. But what hung so heavily on my conscience that I had to mention it in the diary was that I had spoken to, and even been seen home by, a drunken man.
It might seem incredible that a girl should so definitely refuse to tell her mother such a story. The fact was that I knew, however vaguely, that there were other ‘dreadful things’ a girl might do and I resented — being already in the mood for resentment — the suspicion I read in my mother's eyes.
* * * *
That year, 1886, my brother went Home to be educated. How that came about is a remarkable story.
One Sunday afternoon some two years earlier my mother laid down a copy of the Cornhill magazine she had been reading, saying, ‘Christ's Hospital! That's the school I should like Sonny to go to.’ (Yes, we were absurd enough to call my unfortunate brother ‘Sonny’ till he was eight years old.)
She went on to tell us of the large number of highly successful men who had been educated there, not to speak of the few really great ones who had written of this ‘Blue-coat School’.
‘It is improved now,’ she said, ‘and this article explains that the majority of its pupils are boys of good family, whose people are in poor circumstances. That's why they are so successful. They realise the need for work.’ She read out a long list of naval and army men, captains of industry, explorers, and engineers. She tore from the magazine a picture of a most seraphic little boy dressed in the Blue-coat uniform, and pinned it on a reredos contraption over her bed. It stayed there till it grew brown and curled with the sun.
* * * *
The Campbells still lived in manorial magnificence at Otekaike. Mrs Campbell often asked my mother to stay, and, when by chance she was in funds and had suitable clothes, she would accept the standing invitation.
It happened in 1885 that a certain Dr Inglis, who was visiting New Zealand with the object of collecting geological specimens for the
At any rate, she knew enough of geology to interest this Dr Inglis, and she found in talking to him that he was Chairman of the Board of Governors of Christ's Hospital. She invited him to come to Timaru and gave him her collection of New Zealand and Australian specimens. No doubt Mrs Campbell had hinted to him what she wanted in return. A few months after he went home a presentation to the Blue-coat School came for
Funds must have been at a very low ebb just then, for I did not come up from Dunedin to see him off, and we never dreamed of such a thing as a cable on his safe arrival. The Government published their cable, ‘Ionic berthed four p.m. London Dock. Cargo of frozen meat in good order’. My mother said that meant her boy.
Chapter5
Waitohi Flat
There was nothing remarkable about my school-days, except that Dunedin Girls' High School was in itself something of a pioneer venture. Certain advanced women had for some time been agitating for academic education for girls. They dared proclaim that if men benefited by certain forms of education it was reasonable to suppose that women would also. It was in response to this persistent propaganda that the Otago Education Board had taken over a successful school established by a Mrs Burns and had made it into New Zealand's first public boarding-school. My mother, who had set her face against all boarding-schools of the old type, warmly approved of this new project.
The principal of the House in my day was Miss Bathgate, a Scottish aristocrat of the old school and a great lady. Wherever such a woman is in power she is bound to make a deep impression and a lasting mark on any young thing capable of appreciating what is best in the world. Apart from Miss Bathgate, however, I recall nothing outstanding in the school.
She must have been born well before the Victorian era and, as might have been expected, she retained the prejudices of that time. She disapproved of scholarship girls, not in words of course, but in many subtle ways. When she spoke to the pupils her eye never caught theirs but rested on some girl of whom she could approve. They naturally reacted against her in language strong and forcible. We were taken for walks in ‘croc’, as was usual. One day, before we started, she said, ‘Now, I want you to go to Ocean Beach to fill your lungs with, ozone. Does anyone know what ozone is?’ ‘Yes,’ chirps a smart scholarship-holder. ‘It's an
The school had an excellent headmaster of whom it was generally said that he was too good for a girls' school. He was later transferred to the Boys' High School, that good material should no longer be wasted.
Two years was the shortest time in which I could possibly have matriculated but, returning home at the end of the first year, I found my mother at the end of her tether as far as her earning-capacity was concerned. She had taught all Timaru to dance and a large proportion of it to paint and do fancywork. Now, in this nadir of the depression, there was absolutely no more money to be extracted from the town. Her health, too, for the time being, had given way.
I did not clearly discern then that an effort should have been made to allow me to matriculate. On the contrary I was delighted when my mother, as resourceful as ever, told me of a small school that she was sure I could get if she made an effort in the right quarter.
It was in an isolated district called Waitohi Flat where teachers seldom stayed for long, but she thought it would be just the place for us; a place where we could save money and I could study by myself. She was an artist at making the future seem bright.
She went to see the chairman of the Education Board who was anything but encouraging. It was a settlement of bog-Irishmen. He called them obstreperous swine and Fenians, unfit for human company. But he did concede that if a teacher could once manage to ‘get under their stays’ there would be no telling what could be done with them. He promised that I should be appointed provided the School Committee was agreeable to the appointment. There was a good new school-house and the salary was £100 a year. I defy anyone to-day to begin to understand what affluence that meant to me. I will just mention that girls were glad to be appointed as pupil teachers at twelve pounds a year.
No transition period, no flapper stage, separated the girl of those days from the grown-up young lady. The change was brought about deliberately. It was an epoch-making moment, prepared for, stitched for, looked forward to — the day a girl put up her hair, let down her skirts and ‘came out’. In my case the transition came about with indecent haste.
My mother put a frill on my best school frock; the same day I pinned up my hair. The next day we hired a horse and trap from the livery stables and my mother, sister and I set out for Waitohi Flat, not so much to see if we liked the district as to see if the district would like us — or rather me. We trotted at a fair pace over twelve miles of macadamised road, passed The Levels, then a thriving sheep-station where the hunt was held, came to Pleasant Point where we fed the horse and ourselves. Then we turned, as directed, into a rough track worn into three grooves. It led to the mile-wide bed of the unbridged Opihi River, a desert of gorse, broom, toi toi and flax cut here and there by a vagrant stream.
‘Won't yous be feared to cross the river?’ asked the man from whom we had enquired the way.
But the memory of Mackenzie Country's snow-fed torrents smiled at the sparkling Opihi rippling over the stones. We pulled up the steep bank on the other side and were there. Cultivated fields, crops of wheat and oats, some grass paddocks, but where were the houses? We drove past a mud hovel on the right and came to another on the left.
‘Get down,’ said my mother, ‘and ask in this place where the chairman of the Committee lives.’
It was open to the road though some straggling gorse bushes seemed to suggest that once they had formed a hedge. The walls of the hut were of cob, the roof thatch, the floor earth. Small windows were embedded deep in the walls and the chimney, also of cob, was nearly as big as a room and all awry. Hens, ducks, dogs and dirty children basked round the open door. A broad, heavy woman, wiping her
How my young sister, who never lost her head, laughed when I returned to the trap with my tale.
‘You big duffer! You ought to have said it was Mrs Ostler or Lady Ostler.’
Well, I applied and was appointed to Waitohi Flat School and we all came out to occupy the school-house. Waitohi was a cropping district — wheat, oats and barley. Instead of the usual summer holidays the school took only a week off at Christmas and four or five weeks in February in order that the children should be available to help with the harvest. Thus it happened that eleven days after I left school I found myself headmistress or sole mistress of a country school, bewildered but happy and very proud.
The picture of this district, as it was then, I have drawn in my novel, Moonshine. The description and the account of the Flat's one excitement, the making of illicit whisky, are so accurate that I cannot bring myself to repeat them. The characters in that sketch are, of course, fictitious, but not exaggerated. If I describe here the real people some big buck Irishman with a shillelagh may accost me to enquire why I have caricatured his grandfather.
In one particular I must, however, have given a very false impression, for a critic of Moonshine remarked on the picture I had given of the terrible poverty in which these Irish lived. Not a bit of it! According to their own
We learnt that they had been brought free as emigrants from an Ireland then rife with famine and Fenianism. Temporary barracks had been built for them at the ports until they obtained work. This particular batch had been employed by what they called ‘the cumpny’, meaning the Australian and
When, with the aid of wife and every child, some sort of dwelling was provided, they put in a crop of potatoes, the children acting as a fence to keep off such pigs and other stock as the settlement owned. This, I believe, is the most primitive form of land settlement that this country has known.
When their holdings were granted, land was selling at fifteen and twenty pounds an acre. When we went to
The women milked and made butter, selling it as their own special perk. They valued independence. A Timaru grocer called at every farm once a week, carrying a load of merchandise and taking away eggs and butter. This was equivalent to. their market-day, when they put on a clean apron and perhaps swept around the door. Some of the women prided themselves on being able to keep the house, as well as clothe the children, on the proceeds of their dairies, for Kernohan brought tempting draperies in his cart — serge for skirts, gay print for blouses.
Their buying-power was limited by the butter supply; they seldom ran into debt. The price of butter fluctuated widely. If a farmer had the foresight to provide a winter cow his wife might sell the butter at three and six a pound, but this was hardly possible from the distance of Waitohi. The women who obtained this fancy price must market it themselves, set out attractively in baskets. Two shillings was considered good from Kernohan. As the season advanced the price dropped to tenpence — eightpence — and sixpence. When, in the height of summer, it fell below sixpence there would be grumbling. The men declared they would sooner
And what oily, revolting stuff it was! Pounds of butter were pressed in round moulds, usually with some emblem on the top — a rose, a thistle, a cow — the crest of the maker. Nothing divided the pounds, which in summer fainted into each other's arms. By the time Kernohan reached town, it must have been one greasy mess, or even a liquid, for Canterbury summers are hot.
At all seasons, when you bought butter from a shop, it was necessary to take a plate on which to carry it. After a while some tidy housewife started wrapping her butter in bits of wet rag — old sheets and garments. (All undergarments were of calico in those days.) This was an improvement, and if, in removing the rags, you came across a hem or a bit of embroidery, it aroused no comment. Shortly afterwards came butter-muslin. It cost twopence a yard, double width, but was the very mischief to cut into the required squares. Butter-paper came about 1894 when round moulds disappeared and the pound of butter became rectangular. Factory butter, in the early years of this century, transformed the dairy industry.
Now Waitohi, in its earlier years, was a good wheat-growing district and wheat, before refrigeration was in full swing, was one of the few exportable products. We asked ourselves where the profits of the farms went. Certainly the wives did not spend them, nor was high living a charge on the income — bread (home-made), mutton, potatoes, eggs, tea, sugar and treacle appeared to be the staple diet. They bought up-to-date farm implements and good draught horses. The men went to town something less than once a month — a spring-cart full of them — and came back very merry. In the small hours of the morning we sometimes heard drays lumbering along the metalled road. My mother wondered what they could be doing and, with her keen intuition, sensed that something was afoot of which we
The news flew round the Flat like African telegraphy, They made no secret of it. Indeed, if we had known how to interpret what had been told us in queer hints, we should have known what was going on long ago. We learnt that a certain
We noticed a distinct anxiety. Some of the women confided in us that they would be glad if their men had nothing to do with the ‘mountain dew’, but the same
We never grew to know and to understand these primitive people. They were cringing and arrogant, generous and mean, friendly and flowing, yet they loved to hurt. Their tongues flattered but were full of poisoned barbs.
Chapter6
Land in the North
When we went to Waitohi in 1887 my sister was sent to school in Melbourne where my mother's relations lived. She was one of those happy-natured people who can give a humorous turn to everyday things and the Flat seemed flatter than ever without her. Though we had bought ourselves a horse and trap it was a dull enough existence until my mother developed an acute attack of land-hunger. This was soon to grow endemic in New Zealand, but, as hers was an early case, her friends looked upon it as an absurd eccentricity; for land as an investment had been anathema in Canterbury ever since the crash of the landed interests in the early 'eighties. All round us land that was said to have no value was grazed by big owners and by mortgage companies. At each small piece of workable land, suitably fenced, or bounded by a winding creek, my mother would plan what we would do with it if it were ours — there the house would stand, there the orchard and a fowl-yard, there a duck-yard bounded by the water, there the bees and over there the vegetables. We made several attempts to buy our fancied plots but were always told that, even if the owners could be induced to sell, the survey and title of a small portion would cost more than they were worth. Still, land, land, land occupied my mother's thoughts — land as the sole source of life, the source of wealth, of plenty, of beauty, and of the only security life could offer. Under vases and pincushions about the house you might find small slips of paper with lists written in her inimitable handwriting. ‘Things needed for the first year on farm’, or ‘Things to produce for sale on a small farm’ — all in neat little lines with prices affixed.
A copy of the Christchurch Press fell into our hands and we saw that the Manawatu Company was cutting up its grants of land in sections, from five acres to two thousand, and selling them monthly by public auctions. That was obviously the thing to do — go to the
‘You have worked and saved, you have astonished us all, and now you are going to throw it all away.’
It happened that our land agent, Mr Clulee, had recently lost a few hundreds of this hard-earned money by lending it on house property which, as the depression deepened, proved not worth the value of the mortgage.
‘Why,’ said one friend, ‘the whole of that coast is an impenetrable forest. Huge trees and no clear land. They say eight Austrians were a week chopping at one tree.’
‘That is obviously a joke against the Austrians,’ countered my mother. ‘We shall employ Englishmen.’
‘How do you know it isn't swarming with rabbits?’
‘Because rabbits don't live in the bush.’ She refused to be laughed out of the venture.
When my mother said sadly, ‘They all say I shall lose every penny,’ I answered, ‘Well, I suppose you have as much right to lose it as Mr Clulee has.’
She always said that that remark decided her. I was earning a salary that in those penurious days seemed reasonably good; but I caught the virus too, and was as eager as she for the land venture. Finally, in 1888, I resigned my post. We packed and took berths — for our sins — in a little coastal vessel, sailing from Timaru wharf, which called at Akaroa and Kaikoura before waddling into Wellington Harbour. We were both bad sailors, more dead than alive when we stood on firm earth once more. Oh yes! The ferry-boats ran from Lyttellon much as they do to-day. Why then did we endure that horrid penance? I suppose the
Anticipating merely passing through Wellington, we had not troubled to ask for introductions to people there. But as soon as we could stagger to our feet and begin business, chance arranged that one of the surveyors in the Manawatu Company's office had been on a Mackenzie Country survey party and had stayed with us at Ben Ohau. He spoke about us to others and soon we had a small circle of acquaintances, mostly from Canterbury. One of them was Mr McKerrow who also had visited us in the Mackenzie Country and was now Under-Secretary of Lands under the Atkinson Ministry. He took us under his wing, assuring us that if we really wanted to buy land — which he obviously considered incredible — he could show us a much better proposition than the Company's auctions.
‘Even the cleverest and most experienced men are taken down at those monthly auctions,’ he said.
He told us that
Mr McKerrow showed us the plans, purring over them and pointing out their advantages and the special advantage
There was only one fault about the scheme as introduced by
After the ballot was drawn we were taken by the Public Works train to Levin, as the township had been named, and met by a young surveyor detailed to show settlers their sections. The whole place appeared to be a sea of standing bush on both sides of the railway-line. We walked down the line, stepping from sleeper to sleeper, then through some rough bush until we reached a tram-line built by the sawmill which was already operating. We were surprised by the beauty and smooth finish of the track. The rails were sawn timber, nailed to rough bush sleepers, but the whole was heavily ballasted with sawdust — red rimu sawdust, the
We saw what looked like extensive park lands, the turf, short and well-kept, like a bowling-green, was studded with trees — tall, stately, wide-spreading trees and shrubs. Each tree was trimmed at exactly the same height from the ground, with the utmost precision — as level as a ceiling. The whole looked like a well-kept plantation or park. Our ecstatic cries provoked a loud, startled snort, and a sudden stamp of hooves and, before we could speak, a splendid black stallion galloped past, followed, in single file, by about twenty wild horses of various sizes and colours, their picturesque manes and long tails streaming behind.
‘These are your lawn mowers,’ remarked the surveyor. ‘They keep your trees well clipped, too.’
I do not remember what either of us said, probably nothing coherent. We asked, of course, whether the horses went with the land, and were told, with a smile, that they were certainly ours if we could catch them. I had, at that time, infinite faith in myself as a tamer of animals and privately determined that I would soon have the whole mob eating out of my hand. How little I understood of the long,
Chapter7
Levin Block
My mother and I returned to Wellington well satisfied. Beyond the thrill of its beauty, the clearing on our section gave us the special advantage that we might occupy at once, whereas every other settler on a bush section had to wait till his bush was felled, left to dry and then burnt before he could as much as walk about his land. This is how it happened that two women were the very first settlers in the Levin Block.
We decided to leave Wellington as soon as we could find anyone to build us a house on the land, for boarding in town was an expense we would be glad to avoid. I will own to a certain secret reluctance. I was a shy, unsophisticated girl, hurried from school to school-teaching in the country. I hardly knew anything of the life of young people of my own age. I had seen a glimpse of things in Wellington of which I would fain have learnt more. However, we had come to take up land. We, or rather my mother, interviewed builders, and studied estimates for some days. But it appeared that the boom that was taking place in land had induced a corresponding boom in house-building and though builders were eager to take contracts we found none prepared to start work at once. Perhaps they were more scrupulous in those days. I have known modern contractors promise to start half a dozen houses at once.
Our furniture was stored at the sawmill near Levin and we thought we might be more successful in finding a builder on the spot.
We remembered a little cottage built by a Danish workman towards the south of the Levin Block, on a stony clearing. Taking the Public Works train, we went to see
We lost no time in moving to these lodgings from which, every day, we could walk up to our section. We bought two billhooks, armed with which, a billy and some sandwiches, we set out every morning to attack the clumps of spikey bush-lawyer, which were the only green things on the section we could bear to exterminate. In an amateurish way we must have done pretty good work. We slashed and hewed the springy piles to pieces, burnt stalks and leaves, sowed grass-seed on the large, round, bare patches we had made and purred with satisfaction to see the down of green blades appear.
I remember that the wild horses made sad havoc of some of our patches of new grass. They rolled in the soft earth, apparently danced and held midnight revels so that they made shallow basins where we had raked the earth smooth and flat. An examination of the clearing showed nine of the primeval giants of the forest still standing, their clean, stately columns seeming to soar to the skies, and their branches, freed from the struggle for light and air, flung wide and bushy, but still out of proportion to the enormous trunks. They looked like green parasols hoisted on tall masts.
Still more attractive than the giant matai and rimu, because they met the eye without the effort of gazing upwards, were the trees of medium growth — miro and matipo. These, when space had been cleared, had spread like huge weeping willows, and as never leaf or twig was allowed to push downward within reach of a horse's outstretched neck they were trimmed straight as a ceiling, every tree at exactly the same level.
The clearing was apparently circular with a slight but distinct rise in the centre, providing a perfect building-site. The encircling virgin bush had developed a natural edge of
Mrs Petersen proved the kindest and cleanest of landladies but, oh! the fleas! The place fairly heaved with them, inside and out. Men and dogs had camped there and left a legacy beyond control. The strange thing was that neither she nor her husband or son seemed to feel them. One morning when I had caught and killed so many that I felt as gory as a butcher, she said with surprised admiration, ‘Haf you r'ally gotten one?’ The wallpaper, clearly hung by the most amateurish of amateurs, was torn and hanging loose from the scrim. One could hear fleas all night, flop, flop, flopping like frogs on the sounding paper. We had to get away somehow, even if we had to buy a tent. Then came a decrepit old Swede who said he was a ‘push carpenter’ and could build us a shed for our goods where we could live until a house was built.
We had learnt by now that timber was no problem. We had already had rough boards and bits for firewood thrown off the tram-line and we knew we had only to ask the trolley driver and we could have as much as we liked. So far we had asked for ‘facecuts’, the first slices off the logs with the bark adhering, but even the second sappy boards were practically for nothing. I do not remember the exact cost, but I know that four years later, when we built a house, the price of heart of rimu was four shillings and elevenpence per 100ft. and matai flooring the same.
The structure built by the bush carpenter was about 12ft. by 12ft. We purchased nails, hinges, a lock and one window and we sat down on the short cropped lawn to watch the wonder take shape. Presently I exclaimed, ‘Why! There's nothing in this building, I see how it is done. If I had a
On the advice of the builder, the roof, as well as the walls, had been weatherboarded. He had said, without much conviction, that if he made the pitch of the roof high enough and overlapped the boards well it should be watertight. We reasoned to our own satisfaction that one board placed over another must throw off water. It seems incredible now that we knew nothing of, or gave no thought to, that blessing of pioneers, corrugated iron. So many things had proved easy that were supposed to be impossible that we trusted to our luck.
We had brought a miscellaneous collection of what we called furniture. We had been careful to pack everything that we thought necessary for a primitive life. We had packed as well as our lares and penates certain things precious to us because they had been hard to come by and we feared would never be acquired again. Thus, after much hesitation, we had brought a piano. We saw, now that our goods had been brought down, that it would be impossible to store them in the new structure and live in it too. So, after a few days of impossible congestion, when one had to climb over the piano to get into bed, we made ourselves an alfresco dining-room. A splendid matipo, with a spread like the largest weeping willow, grew behind the whare. We strewed sawdust under it as a carpet. Three really valuable carved oak chairs that we had not been able to find it in our hearts to part with we wickedly put out there, saying that we would cover them with sacks if it rained. A small iron garden table and a colonial oven we had bought in Wellington for the prospective house stood upon two kerosene boxes to form a sideboard. This last was invaluable, for food could be kept in it safe from wekas, whose curiosity led them to make a great nuisance of themselves. They did not seem to fancy any of our food but they would run away with small
Almost any morning we could find lying on the tram-line, where a morepork had evidently found room to do his work, a skin looking like a glove turned wrong side out. The skin was always quite whole, yet every scrap of flesh, even the brain, had been picked from it. The grey-blue fur was long and silky and as soft as chinchilla. It is a pity if this rat is extinct. As late as 1911 my husband caught one in Levin; all the bush rats I have seen in the King Country, however, were the ordinary grey vermin.
We had certainly achieved a charming dining-room but dining-rooms do not necessarily provide dinners. Where did these come from? There was no butcher, baker, milkman, nor any way of obtaining eggs, butter, fish or vegetables. Those things leave a big gap in the commissariat.
There was no real train service, but the Public Works' train ran daily as far as Levin, and certain Wellington firms sent a man on it to take orders from the mill-hands. If we had cared to walk two miles to the sawmill, where the train stopped, and give an order we should have had to walk it again the next day to receive the goods, there being no railway store where it could be kept. We might, had we cared, have got over some of these difficulties but we determined — as would most lone women — to subsist upon such things as could be ordered monthly from a grocer: flour, tea, sugar, oatmeal (without milk), rice and such preserved things as were known in those days. Our staple diet was ship's biscuits and rice. There were luxuries in the shops. but we seldom included them in our orders.
Bread and butter were the commodities we missed most. We had them for a few days after the order came, but home-made butter does not keep long. Dried apricots had just come on to the market. They were little brown things, the size of a halfpenny. We liked them and sucked them raw as sweets. They cost fourpence a pound! I do not like to think what the modern dietitian would say of our fare, but I can state positively that, though in the
One day we looked out to see an old Maori man walking casually round our garden. Horrible! What to do? My mother, who never deigned to show nervousness, strode out to him and said firmly, ‘What do you want?’
He smiled benignly, saying, ‘I look roun'. You t' widow?’
We both drew a deep breath and wondered what the next move should be, but it soon dawned on us that there was no guile in the old man. Quite a long conversation followed, of which I hope he understood more than we did. At any rate he called the next day bringing us a large pumpkin. What a treat it was!
It was our custom to work outside, my mother gardening and fencing or digging till lunch time, then, as neither wanted to go in, we took it in turns to prepare the meal. ‘In’ is a euphemism, for our fire was outside and so was our dining-room. The day after our Maori visitor came my mother cooked pumpkin and made it into a tasty dish with butter, pepper and salt. The next day, when my turn came, butter was off so we dined cheerfully on pumpkin. I might not have remembered that trifle but when writing to my sister in Melbourne we must have made a story of it and she always afterwards referred to that autumn as our pumpkin-and-pepper period.
It was some time after we moved into our whare that rain tested the roof. There was a drip, drip, drip, right on to
We had arranged that day to go to see some people called Retter who had farmed for years near the Maori pa, on the other side of
I was on the roof, busy with hammer and shingle-nails, when the man who was to be my husband came to see us. I went on working, expecting it to be a business interview, till my mother called me to have a cup of tea.
‘This is
While drinking the milkless tea, he told us of the wildpig hunt and of the number of cattle they had seen in the hills, and explained that he had a camp two miles away.
Some recollections of my first impression of the man whose life was to be linked with mine for nearly half a century seem in order. But it is not easy, unless the reader is prepared to discount such a description, for it would be strange indeed if the fuller knowledge of the long, happy, anxious years had not coloured and distorted these early memories. Concerning a few factual matters I am on firm ground. He was of medium height, stockily built, broad-shouldered, strong-jawed, blue-eyed, and had a wealth of fair, wavy hair that grew attractively from the forehead. Alas! This feature did not stand by him long. At a remarkably early age he began to grow bald, but his row of even white teeth was practically intact to the end.
It was my mother who first remarked on his unusual buoyancy and cheery disposition. She christened him
His speech was vivid and full of jocular exaggerations, descriptions and similes, all his own — ‘As cunning as a wombat’; ‘The thick matai trunks standing like a field of oats.’
Describing a neglected farm, he said, ‘Grass! Not a blade. Scrub, fern and moss are racing which shall grow the highest and the moss is winning.’
Sometimes his descriptions were whimsical to the point of being farcical, but were always amusing and original.
On this occasion, when he found that we had no means of cooking a joint, he said, ‘Then I must cut it into chops for grilling.’
He seized a piece of fencing-wire and with a few twists produced a gridiron, the extra long handle of which was the greatest boon. We learnt to place our frying-pan on the gridiron so that we were able to fry without being almost cremated. I forget whether or not it was on this first visit that he taught us how to make scones on an open fire. You mix the dough as usual and, sharpening a stick at both ends, wrap the mixture round one end like a furled flag. Then you drive the other point into the ground so that the scone is held at the right distance from the fire, which should be glowing embers. Turn the stick from time to time. The dough will swell up like a tennis-ball. When done, draw out the stick and fill the hole with butter — if you have any.
We have often found this useful and amusing at picnics or camping expeditions. We had already learnt to make what we called damper, a thinnish batter cooked in a frying-pan. This can be quite good if you have milk and the odd egg. It is much like a pikelet. But we learnt now that this was the height of luxury compared with the Australian swagger's damper, which is merely flour and salt and water mixed very thin and poured on the hot hearth whence the fire has been raked. We tried it but it did not find favour.
Our new friend (his name was
Above all things, we desired to catch a wild horse. My efforts at taming them had proved worse than useless.
You will remember that we put in an application for those particular sections marked on the Government map as having permanent water. This consisted of a well dug in a swampy place by the mill for watering its bullocks. For that purpose a twenty-foot white-pine trough stood before the well. There was no other water for the wild horses except in very wet seasons. Poor things! Our coming must have been a great blow to them. You could watch a furtive head poke out from the thick bush and quickly
I would fill the trough and stand concealed nearby. I could see their terror-stricken eyes roll round vigilantly as they sucked greedily at the water, their bodies ready poised to dash off at the least sound, even the moving of a twig. I am inclined to doubt stories about the sense of smell that is supposed to guide and warn horses, for my hiding-place was not three yards from them.
Mr Wilson — as he was to us then — told us how horses were caught with a rope noose hung across their regular tracks through the bush.
No, he had never caught one. They weren't always worth the breaking-in. The young mares had already been caught and the young colts were always killed or driven away by the old stallion. However, there were a couple in the mob that might be worth catching. He would set a snare some Sunday.
When the Sunday came we watched eagerly for the horses to come for their daily drink. They were beginning very gradually to show less fear. From concealment we saw them, their thirst quenched, turn and canter off to regain the bush. A slight movement was sufficient to divert the leader from his place and to create enough confusion for a big chestnut mare to dash first down the track. The noose closed on her and pulled her up with a jerk that we thought would dislocate every limb. Her captor, keeping clear of the flying legs, went to her head, loosened the stranglehold and pressed the straining head firmly to the ground. She could no longer plunge so wildly.
‘I know this old girl,’ he said with disgust. ‘She's not worth a damn.’ He opened her frothing mouth. ‘Come and look at her teeth. You can come round this way. She can't
I can't say I saw much. I had no eyes for anything but the writhing, agonised creature.
‘She's the great-grandmother of the bunch. Our luck's out. Shall I let her go?’
‘Yes! Yes! Oh, quickly.’
We did not want that or any other wild horse, now or ever.
‘But can you? Is it possible?’ we asked, looking at the tangle of horseflesh, rope and branches. We never expected to see her all in one piece again.
‘Easy as falling off a log,’ and he cut the end of the rope near the slip-knot.
The old mare struggled to her feet in remarkably short time and galloped off.
The following spring he caught us two foals from the wild mob. By then we had acquired a cow and we brought them up by hand, on cow's milk. One turned out a handsome beast. The other was sold, for if its rider should dismount and allow it to wander, as many men will with an easily caught nag, it would deliberately seek out the milking-bail and drink any milk it found in a bucket. The man who bought that glutton thought it a great joke. I am not so sure if a farmer would see the humour, or his wife, who might be awaiting the evening milk.
We saw wild pig but once. I had gone to the potato patch to dig a root for lunch It was fenced. We thought ourselves great fencers. From the timber sent by the mill we selected scantlings for posts, to which we nailed rails of four-by-one battens, partly mortising them for extra strength. On these rails we nailed boards close together. The appearance was satisfactory and they felt firm, for each board was buried a foot or so in the ground. But — and it was a big but — the sappy wood had no lasting power. Before three years were over they were rotting away.
Well, the potato patch was not finished with boards, but merely with posts and rails because, as far as we knew, we were fencing against wild horses only. But, as I stooped for the potatoes, a tiny black piglet ran by me. I threw myself upon it, but the sow, a huge brute with its red mouth wide open, rushed to save her squealing baby. I climbed the fence with the thing in my arms and she stood below, telling what she'd do to me if I would only come down. I wondered how long I was going to be there, but the rest of her brood came squeaking about her and perhaps she couldn't count. At any rate, she marched off with them.
We thought we had a great treasure, and we laboured long and hard to make an enclosure and a shelter for our piglet. We would have sworn that nothing without wings could have escaped. In the night we heard the mother pig making contact with her baby, and in the morning our fine pigsty was a heap of matchwood tossed all around.
But I have blundered years ahead. Neither foals nor piglet were caught till after we had bought a cow. We had now reached only May of our first autumn, 1889, a particularly beautiful season. Day after day and week after week were so warm and still and sunny that we were tempted to believe we had come to a land of perpetual summer. My mother suggested that, as it was my birthday, we should take a walk to
However, the tips of the cut supplejacks shone white in the gloom and we thought they would guide us. They did, until we came to a place where a tree had fallen over the line. Coming, we had been able to walk round the head of the tree quite easily and as easily find the line again. We could no longer do so. It was dark, quite dark, and we never found that track again. We were lost.
In a bush settlement there is always considerable talk about ‘getting bushed’. We knew that people are apt to walk in circles and become lost in a few acres. From time to time the mill-hands would go pig or cattle hunting and be missing for a night or even two. The train was often asked to whistle loudly and frequently to guide someone who had been away too long. But no soul knew of our having left home, or would dream of enquiring. We might have taken a trip to Wellington for all anyone knew. We began to think our plight serious. We knew there were fifty miles of standing bush between us and
My mother said, ‘We've only to find the Southern Cross, follow where the Pointers point and we'll come out in the clearing where the Petersens live.’
But how, through that canopy of leaves, could we ever hope to see more than one star at a time?
We blundered on. It was incredibly rough going. That part of Levin to-day looks perfectly flat but it seemed to us then that we were continually falling through leaves and branches into deep ravines where surface-water frightened and wet us. Once we saw a patch of sky showing a few stars. My mother said she recognised them but I doubted it. The train came up and its roar, reverberating through the bush, sounded very near, but my mother thought the sound came
At last we came to almost impenetrable undergrowth and no high trees and, after a final fight, we were in the Petersens' clearing and the Southern Cross hung low on the horizon in front of us.
Day was dawning when we reached home.
* * * *
My mother may not have taken my building ambitions very seriously but I was full of enthusiasm, so, as soon as the shingling was finished and had proved satisfactory, I set out to build a room on to the whare — a kitchen. It was wonderfully easy going, for our
Next, for my architectural blood was up, I built a bathroom. (We had had only a zinc washing-tub.) The bath was a wooden trough made of five 12in. by 2in. white-pine boards. With a borrowed auger, we made a hole and carefully rounded a piece of wood to fit it as a plug. I carried
After that — perhaps a year later — we built another bedroom for my sister, who was due from Melbourne. We lined, ceiled, scrimmed and papered that room. The paper was only newspaper, but it was washed with whiting and tinted pink with a tube of crimson lake, out of my mother's Winsor and Newton water-colours; we were very proud of that effort.
But the triumph of the structure was represented by the two porches. The first was purely utilitarian. We found outside drips from the shingled roof very annoying in the doorway, especially when frost was melting. We had made a wooden spouting but it gaped in fine weather. So we thought that extending the roof by a porch might help. This, when finished, added so astonishingly to the appearance of the shack that I grew very aspiring, and designed a much finer one for the main door. Its hipped roof was supported by posts from the bush, straight and bark-covered; the sides were latticed, and there were benches on each side to sit on. The garden table stood there at first, but soon my mother conceived a new use for it. Along the trolley-line on the way to the mill was the stump of a huge rimu. It was quite five feet across. Passing along the tram-line we had often remarked on the slaughter of that noble tree; for the early settlers who destroyed so much valuable timber were yet keenly alive to the pity of it. What my mother desired was a horizontal slice, about two inches thick, sawn off the top of that stump, and placed on the small iron table to make a sizeable dining-table. When we had achieved this we thought it beautiful.
It was a queer room, that kitchen-cum-living-room. We had whitewashed the walls, finding out — or being told — that a slab of glue, melted and added to the wash, made a smooth surface that did not rub off. The chimney was like a small room, with whitewashed hobs and a high mantel-piece.
There was the incongruous piano, the unheard-of table, the mixture of carved oak chairs and deal boxes and the window merely a rectangular space in the wall, with a penthouse eyebrow outside and shutters fastening from inside.
* * * *
We heard now the history of our holding and how the phenomenon of a clearing, with no access nor any means of approach, had come to be hidden away in the midst of miles and miles of virgin bush apparently never trodden by man.
The story is a native tragedy.
In the early years of the nineteenth century the natives living round the lake were in deadly fear of the terrible chief
The Herculean task was said to have been performed chiefly by the women of this tribe, who carried baskets of the sandy soil on their backs. (To-day, you can see the escarpment on the side of a hill that provided that soil.) The men drove long stakes into the bed of the lake, throwing timber, flax and toi toi to act as a foundation. At last, basket by basket — we can hardly imagine the toil — two islands were formed, which, as far as I can remember, were about three chains in diameter. (In my day, they were covered with rank vegetation: and Maori geese used to nest on them.)
The islands were protected from canoe attack by a system of underwater stakes, with a secret passage, on the
In due course he came but, alas, the Maoris had not heard of the new devilish ‘bang-stick’, the weapon of the pakeha. Not only did
Their existence must have been the last word in wretchedness. Imagine felling, with stone axes, enough space in the virgin bush to plant a crop — the soil thick with tough roots and not even a spade to cultivate land. Here were we, enjoying the benefit of their clearing, fed by the produce of civilization, sheltered by sawn timber, clothed in wool, and thinking that we were roughing it and we were pioneers. We decided that they could not possibly have lived through the first winter if some of their kin had not secretly befriended them. We liked to imagine a captive Maori maid of their tribe stealing away secretly to bring them the first seed potatoes or a smouldering brand to light their first fire. We were told that they dared not light a large fire lest their relentless enemies, the Ngatitoa, should spy the
By this time we were beginning to realise that the world in which we had buried ourselves was now not entirely devoid of people. Two beautiful girls, on excellent horses, side-saddled, and properly equipped, rode up one day to see us. They were the Misses McDonald from the coast, some seven miles away.
Mr McKerrow of the Lands Department had told us of this family and had enjoined us, when a road had been made between the bush and their home, to go and see them; and he had promised us a true Highland welcome. He had written to them about us and they had found their way without a road. There was an immediate affinity between us and, later, this family became an immense interest to us.
The original
The beach had been their only highway and what a busy one it was. Travellers in incredible numbers — distinguished men, foreign as well as English, scientists, artists, explorers, traders, pedlars, entertainers in great variety, vagabonds, runaway sailors and convicts as well as many official parties
This family, when we met them, consisted of five fine, tall sons and two charming daughters. They knew and understood the Maori as well as any pakeha possibly could. They were exceedingly fond of them and were uneasy as to what effect this new white land-settlement in the bush country would have upon them. Clear sand-hill country stretched along the coast of which the Maori had sold a certain proportion, enough to give the natives some contact with European ways but still to leave them as much as they could cultivate or graze. The McDonalds owned the most densely populated area, that surrounding the
The Maori lived, or thought he lived, entirely under his own chiefs and customs. He was proud and independent, for the pakeha government held a light rein and interfered
Do? Oh, one of the sons stepped outside and told them all to go away, that they were alarming his mother and sisters! So they found another battleground and after the fight both sides brought their wounded for Mrs McDonald to doctor.
The relationship between Maori and white settler was ideal. The latter was regarded not so much as a welcome guest, for a guest is a temporary resident, but as a cherished tribal possession, a source of strength and power.
The wealth, status and generosity of ‘their pakeha’ was something to boast about. In early days each tribe had been eager to secure as many pakehas as possible; more pakeha, more blankets, more tobacco and axes. Now they each recognised certain definite obligations, certain mutual aids. The Maori provided the McDonalds with any labour they might need. They gave them obedience and deference without servility such as they gave to their own chiefs. On the other hand, Mrs McDonald mothered them all. She was legal adviser, doctor, scribe and judge, with as much need for wisdom as had Solomon. Her quiet voice and tranquil manner quelled anger before it flared too fiercely, and had saved much rioting.
The eldest son, Hector, had married a Wellington girl, built himself a wooden house, and lived with his wife and two little girls not far from the old homestead. He took no part in the management of the farm; indeed, I never knew him do anything except garden. But his wife was a bright spot to us. She was considerably tied, for where there are no roads there are no vehicles, and a young family is hard to transport on horseback. She was, however, remarkably
Her young brother, Mr W. Rigg, who sometimes stayed with her, came one day to take us across the lake in a canoe to see his sister and, as we had expressed an interest in the Maori, he proposed that we should stay on the way and visit the pa, to see a ‘tangi’.
From our own side of the lake we heard, across the water, the infinitely mournful wail.
‘Oh!’ demurred my mother, ‘we surely must not intrude upon such grief.’
We were assured, with a laugh, that it would be all right, that the Maori expected strangers. We were surprised and slightly shocked to be taken to a scene of feasting and merry-making. A whole pig was hanging over a fire, those who tended it were quarrelling fiercely with those who were trying to snatch the best-cooked pieces from the carcase. The mother of the dead woman was trying on the deceased daughter's dress. Suddenly a visiting canoe-load of relations was sighted; everyone left what he or she was doing and hastened to meet them with loud, anguished wails and freely-flowing tears. Then all would be joy again while the guests were feasted.
I said I was shocked. That was the narrow-mindedness of youth. Now that I know more of human sorrow I can see that it is the natural expression of grief, more natural than the habit of our own people who, at that time, used to swathe themselves in black and, for a certain period, never smile after a bereavement. A sense of intolerable loss comes to most of us, as to the Maori, in surges, and mercifully does not hold us in a steady grip. Still, we don't know why Maori tears flow so freely at the demand of etiquette.
The history of the unique old McDonald homestead was sad. The handsome six-foot, sons developed tuberculosis and died one by one. Three of them in rapid succession were
In1873
In1924
In1938
‘Cashmere’, Levin
(Built in 1891 for £200)
(Built in 1891 for £200)
Bushwhackers
(H. H. Ostler standing on the left)
(
It was fortunate that Roderick, the third son, who farmed some bush land near Levin, dictated his memories and some incidents of his father's life to Mr F. O'Donnell who published them under the name of Te Hekenga, a valuable book and an authentic history of the coast.
When we first knew the McDonalds they were afraid for the welfare of the Maori. The bush — the useless bushland, hitherto regarded as a nuisance, a place where stock strayed and were lost — had suddenly become valuable and saleable. The Maori soon found that he could prove ownership to the new asset and large sums had been paid and were still to be paid for it to the chiefs.
We were told by Mrs McDonald that the last time money had come in this way to these tribes they had wasted it in a sort of religious revival. A prophet called
Towards the end of the winter of 1888, which must have been an exceptionally mild one, for I never remember either of us even mentioning cold, timber felling on most of the sections of the block began. It was a new thing in our quiet retreat to hear the ring of axes, and the thud of falling trees. We began to take an interest in it all for he who was to be my husband, though I did not dream of it then, kept us in touch with this new world.
‘D——had a good gang on his section’, or ‘The roughest gang of cut-throats you ever saw went up to A—'s to-day’, or ‘They are making a first-class job on B—'s’.
We learned that in felling a section the undergrowth must first be cut. If this is not meticulously done the ‘burn’ will certainly be a failure, for the green supplejacks and other creepers will not only live but flourish and will resist instead of helping the fire. Contracts for felling were invariably let with the condition that no trees should be felled until the under-scrubbing had been passed. In this the owners were often very unfair to the contractors. They would delay in sending a man to inspect the under-scrubbing, so making the contractor keep his men idle for days. On the other hand the contractors sometimes cheated the owners, because these, being town-bred, were unable to recognise uncut growths.
The Government had already cleared the main road to allow a space to pitch tents. Previously it had been indicated by nothing but surveyor's pegs. In the very centre of Levin, in the dense bush, where the hotel now stands, a surveyor's peg had announced, ‘Corner of Oxford Street and Queen Street’. Some wag, struck by the grandiloquent directions, had under-scrawled, ‘Corner of Hyde Park and Marble Arch’. Now (in 1888–89) Queen Street at least took no finding, but it was strangely unlike a street.
The contract had specified that the undergrowth, everything but the timber trees, should be cut at ground level and carried to the distance of a chain, leaving the timber trees for the mill to take. The gang of Jugoslavs to whom the contract had been let had carried it out meticulously. No branch, trailer or twig littered the carpet of tiny, delicate ferns and orchids on which, at dignified distances apart, stood the great trees. Imagine it! The long, shadowy vistas between those majestic red-brown columns, rising from the living carpet, the hundred-foot-high ceiling of foliage, mellow, green light, sun-pierced, patterning the green carpet with vivid points of gold.
The Jugoslavs, wearing bright-coloured scarves twisted round their heads, called to each other in musical voices. The birds above sang lustily and the axes rang rhythmically. Sight and sound were one perfection. I have lived a long life and most of New Zealand's beauty spots are known to me, but for solemn, impressive, rapturous beauty nothing has ever impressed me so deeply as Queen Street in the making.
Very few people saw it. Perhaps no other stretch of bush was ever felled in that way, so I have always been thankful that I have seen and am able to recall that green cathedral.
Does everyone react to extreme beauty with sadness, intolerable sadness? Or am I peculiar, fantastic? That day I explained away the feeling as due to my belief that trees are sentient beings, that I had been witnessing the death of a hundred-year-old creation, that anyone who understood could not be other than miserable. Since then I console myself by reflecting that nature does not develop a highly sensitised system unless acute sensation is necessary to the survival of the species. So, perhaps, though the tree may feel the axe, its feeling may not be comparable to pain as we know it, for pain, which is necessary to mobile things, is no use to a tree. Probably reason had no part in the sadness — it was pure, overwhelming beauty.
However, we were resolved that no tree should ever be felled on the whole twenty acres of Cashmere, not for any fantastic reason connected with the sentience of the vegetable kingdom, but because the beauty of the clearing depended upon the shelter of the surrounding bush. We soon found, first with indignation and later with resignation, that we were unable to keep that resolve. The neighbours who had no clearings wanted to fell their bush. Indeed, it was forced upon them by the terms of purchase to fell, burn, grass and fence their holdings within a specified time. How could they do this if our boundary was in standing bush? We succumbed to such arguments, and agreed to fell a
When the spring came, we had acquired some poultry, two horses and a cow. Then we felt there was nothing lacking for comfort in life, except the delicious leisure and irresponsibility we had known in the era of scarcity.
In November the mosquitoes appeared, almost with a bang. We had suffered from bites the year before and now hardly had time to acquire mosquito nets when the plague was upon us in full force. In that sheltered clearing they attacked day and night with equal voracity. We had been warned about them.
‘They would put out your lamp or candle.’ ‘You could cut the air with them.’ ‘You couldn't take a bite free from them.’ These assertions were not strictly true but no words could exaggerate the misery of the plague as it fell upon us. We had come in January and if their season was not then over, we had evidently mixed them up with the misery of the Petersens' fleas. Now, they truly poisoned us. We rubbed and scratched and tore at the lumps they raised. The old soldiers talked about leaving them alone —as well ask a thirst-parched man not to drink. We would have fled before them to Wellington, but conditions were changed. We had now a cow, a calf, two foals from the wild horses, a kitten, five hens, and some ducks hatching. We were anchored by our new amenities.
We papered our legs under our stockings, we made ourselves sun-bonnets, starched the hoods and fixed a veil
* * * *
More than half the sections of the Block had been felled and the forest lay heaped in sun-browning masses with vigorous green shoots here and there that spoke of uncut undergrowth. The settlement was holding its breath in expectation of the burn, the great event which, to each man, meant the success or failure of his venture.
The shouted message, ‘It's off! It's off! Started down at Prouses’, hits the nerves like an electric shock. Everyone downs tools and runs to some vantage point to see the thick, curling smoke and shooting flames, to hear the crackling and spitting and the shouts of the ‘firing squad’. These men are so bold that we venture nearer — much nearer. They are running about with flaming brands, spreading the fire. The old hands tell us that ‘It needs more wind’. Sometimes, leaving unburnt patches behind, the flames leap half a chain ahead and, scampering madly up the trunk of a standing
Chapter8
Marriage at Ohau
In 1893 I married and went to live on a small farm at Ohau. We were still in the pioneering stage. The house consisted of four rough rooms, or more correctly two, for the lean-to that made the kitchen and annexe was so primitive a structure as not to be properly called anything but a shelter. There were three wooden chimneys; the two in the front rooms had fireplaces built of large stones — very artistic, I thought. We scrimmed and papered the rooms, washing them with a whitewash made smooth with dissolved glue and tinted a delicate pink with a touch of ruddle. My husband had put a verandah in the front, the posts of which were tree-trunks still in the bark, and the floor was of unplaned boards. At the end of this he built a bathroom with the same old trough bath as at Cashmere. The water we carried from a creek and thought ourselves lucky that we had a permanent supply so handy. All the furniture, except about four pieces, was home-made. There was no wash-house: I boiled clothes in kerosene-tins on the wood-pile.
Nevertheless, the first effort we made, after we had settled ourselves, was to make a tennis court. Mad? Well, I suppose it was. But, you see, circumstances had robbed us both of the fun and frivolity of youth, so we were bent on snatching some of it at a time when we should have been addressing ourselves to serious things. I had played tennis on a few occasions in Dunedin, my husband not at all.
We laboured at the making of our new toy on moonlight nights and fondly called it a chip court. It was, in fact, nothing but smooth earth but we made it very smooth and very hard. We had managed to afford two racquets, a length of wire-netting served as a net, and every Sunday friends
My brother who, as I shall tell later, had returned from school in England, brought with him a ‘lawn tennis set’ donated by a maiden aunt in order that he might ‘introduce lawn tennis into New Zealand’. The racquets were museum pieces, with a queer twist in them and curiously soft strings, but the new net was useful for we were finding the wire-netting hard on balls. What endless fun that court was! My husband could create a hilarious atmosphere wherever he was and whatever he did.
The coming of this brother was a great joy to us. He was a lanky six-feet of boyhood whose wrists and ankles already stuck too far out of his skin-tight clothes; for he had grown on the voyage. He had a crop of long, curly, red hair, high spirits, a hearty laugh and insatiable curiosity. This was not to be wondered at, for he had come from a strange world indeed. Aware that his mother possessed fifteen hundred acres of freehold, See note at end of chapter.
To make matters worse, his home-coming had been a fiasco. For some reason, eternally discussed by the family but never solved, there was no one to meet him when his boat arrived in Wellington, no one to tell him of the kind of life he would find. The disillusionment was sudden, but worse was to follow. He found his own way to Levin and still there was no one to meet him at the station. Over the dark paddocks and muddy tracks he at last found the unlighted house, knocked, and my sister came to the door carrying a candle. He always said that that shock was so great that it rendered him shockproof to all else. He could understand that because of a misdirected wire my mother did not even know that his boat had arrived, but an entrance
By the time he came to visit our queer little ménage he had seen tracks full of roots and puddles called streets (Levin always talked of Queen Street and Oxford Street). He had seen people living in shelters that, by his standards, were not fit for fowls, and was prepared to be delighted with everything we had. By that time we had effected some improvements, needful, for I had my first baby, and, I am ashamed to own, considering the state of our finances, a maid. She was a very small girl, hired to mind the baby; I paid her half-a-crown a week.
If the present day is horrified at such a wage, I will digress to tell a story relating to that girl's family, though it would have fitted many of the Ohau settlers equally well.
The Manawatu Company, in rough imitation of the Government village settlement, had cut up its land near the railway in very small sections — five, seven, ten acres — intended to encourage the working-man to come to the country. The sections were eagerly taken up and the men of the settlement used to foregather in the evening in front of Batalani's store to hear the news (the extravagance of a daily paper was unthinkable) and to tell each other how to farm. My husband, coming out of the store, heard Bill W——, who was usually very pleased with himself, say lugubriously: ‘It's quite true what they all tell you when you go farming, that you didn't ought to spend too much on your house and so leave yourself short in buying stock. I've found it out for myself. Here I've gone and spent seven pounds on building my house and nothing left to buy a cow’. Nobody laughed. There were too many in a similar position. We might afford a smile, for our mansion must have cost quite forty pounds.
If you question my figures on the ground that a man could not house a wife and six children — which this man had — in a structure costing seven pounds, I hasten to explain that, though timber was not flung about so lavishly
We saw quite a lot of my brother and enjoyed seeing our raw world through his English eyes. He appreciated the plenty of our land. Food seemed to him unlimited and wonderfully good. He declared that during his seven years in England he had never once had quite enough to eat. He remained true to this statement to the end of his days. It certainly had not hurt him, for he was a fine physical specimen, and had great endurance. One wonders if the young human animal really needs as much food as it can and does consume. One source of our amusement was that he could not walk on our rough fields. He thought we were performing an acrobatic feat when we crossed the creek on the trunk of a fallen tree. He would be walking in what appeared to us a clear paddock and would suddenly measure his length on the ground. It took him some time to acquire
One of the interests of Ohau was a curious religious fanaticism that swept through the district. We called its devotees ‘dippers’. (They are still extant, I believe.) They called themselves ‘Brethren’ or simply Christians, claiming that they alone held the true interpretation of Christianity, they alone were certain of salvation, they alone were the beloved of God. It seemed to give them exquisite pleasure to contemplate the vast number of those to be damned.
People as poor and unenlightened as most of those who took the small sections of Ohau are not to be found to-day, but the religion was started by farmers of more standing and swept through the district like an epidemic. The whole district would assemble in a shed every Sunday to enjoy a spiritual orgy, a feast of emotion. One Catholic family, one bachelor and ourselves were, I think, the sole unconverted recalcitrants. We must certainly be brought into the fold.
What a battery of argument and persuasion they brought against us! When local eloquence failed, they brought leaders of the movement from outside to convert us — one dear old man with the face of an angel and a cheeky young fanatic with an astonishing flow of words, from Wellington. Solemn warnings were given and prayers — we were told — were offered up for us at their meetings. I was genuinely interested; I wanted to probe into the cause — what we now should call the psychology — of the outbreak. I was fairly well versed in the Bible, and it astonished me to find how words and phrases could be twisted to mean something I thought quite foreign to their intention.
At the beginning of 1897 this fanatical faith reached a climax. It had been revealed to the Brethren that this was to be the year of the Second Coming, the Judgment Day, the end of the world. They could prove it without the shadow
‘But’, I objected, ‘we are expressly told of His coming, “the day nor the hour no man knoweth”.’
‘Ah! That's just the point. No man knoweth, but we, the Saints, know. It has been expressly revealed to the Children of Light. They are never to taste death, nor to abide the Judgment, but are to be told by the Holy Spirit of the day and the hour and are to be caught up to meet the Lord in the skies and shall sit on His right hand, to help to judge the quick and the dead.’
This was too much for me. Hitherto I had argued and listened quite amicably, but to be told that these ignoramuses of Ohau, drunkards, loafers, sneak thieves, the off-scourings of Wellington, were to sit in judgment on the great living and the greater dead, outraged my sense of decency. I was getting hot under the collar when my husband said, ‘Look here, X—. You have a good farm and I've got only a dirty little bit of leasehold, but I could raise some money —enough to build your tabernacle or to take a trip or to do what you like with. I'll raise it and pay it over to you at once in return for the equity of redemption of your farm on Easter Tuesday. What do you say?’
His exaltation faded. He said, ‘Flippancy is out of
Mr X— was no longer in the heavens, no longer a fanatic. He had come down to earth, a practical farmer and, according to repute, a money-grubber. I declared that he was considering how he might get the cash offered and keep the farm too. But no doubt I did him an injustice.
* * * *
We imagined that during our first years of married life we were wonderfully hard-working folk, and indeed my husband was, but looking back I see little but the fun we used to have, inexpensive fun to be sure, but proving that we cannot claim to have worked to the point of exhaustion. Tennis and river-swimming were the summer joys and in winter there was excellent shooting. This last so pleased my young brother that it was hard to resist him when he came down to us with his English fowling-piece, asking my husband to go to the swamps to shoot some duck.
Sometimes I would go too, and on one occasion I remember taking the baby. My husband carried her and we arrived at the place about four or half past, hid her in a flax-bush, and walked along the creek to a place where the duck were likely to come in. The problem was to station ourselves near enough to hear the baby if she wakened and far enough not to disturb her with the gunshots. We hid ourselves and waited till the ducks came in; usually they came in pairs, one for each gun.
That night we had a good bag which, having no dog, the men had to strip and swim for.
Returning to the flax-bush and the long-suffering baby, we found her surrounded by about twelve great Hereford bullocks, cartwheeling excitedly round the spot where they evidently smelt something strange. I was terrified, but my
One incident of that time serves to explain why taking up land was one of the hopes of the working-man. He was driven to it. When we had sufficient cleared land we decided that a small herd of cows and a boy to milk them might bring in some desirable cash. After arranging for the cows, my husband went to Wellington for a boy. He wrote an advertisement in the office of the Evening Post, handing it to the clerk who said, ‘You have not named a place for meeting these boys.’
‘Well, here in this office,’ he suggested.
‘Not on your life,’ said the man. ‘We need breathing space.’
‘Well, outside the Evening Post at eleven to-morrow morning.’
His description of the interview was: ‘When I got there, bless me if the place, the whole street, wasn't alive with boys; boys of all shapes and sizes, coming from all directions like whitebait trickling into a net. When they saw me they began to push and shove, holding up hands and shouting, “Take me, sir, I'm strong”, “Take me, boss, I can milk”, or “I can work”, and one rather small one said, “Take me, I'll come for nothink.” I thought they'd eat me. I simply couldn't choose. I just asked the nearest biggish one if five bob a week would do him. He said, “You bet,” and I said, “Come with me”.’
Economists place 1895 as the nadir of the depression of the 'eighties, as the year when bad times touched bottom. This may seem surprising when refrigeration had been proved a success ten years earlier. The explanation was that it took the British public all that time to overcome its prejudice against frozen mutton. Even. after that date New Zealand visitors in London would report having seen our mutton in the shops, labelled ‘Best Canterbury mutton’, which deluded customers bought thinking it came from
Christmas, 1896, was exciting. I had a school friend from Dunedin and my sister a friend from Melbourne coming to spend the holidays. Both were anxious to see something of cur pioneer existence and declared themselves ready for any discomforts and privations, in fact the more they had of these the better. So we organised a mountain climb. It was no great feat in the eyes of mountaineers. Waiopehu is about 3,500 feet. Surveyors had set a trig upon it years before, but the tracks were quite overgrown and though some men — my husband among them — had hunted cattle in the vicinity no one had climbed the peak.
The party consisted of my sister and friend, myself and friend, my brother and husband, and a small boy, aged twelve, whom we called ‘the gamin’. Alas, not one of the party survives to-day except the gamin, now a white-haired man, and myself. He was the comedian of the party. At heart a serious-minded youth, he saw things from an original angle and expressed them in modern slang. At the same time he was willing enough to repeat any stray story that had hit the mark and given us a laugh. There was one that seemed to us funnier each time it was repeated. If a pause occurred, someone would say, ‘Now, Gamin, tell us the story of old Porp's horse.’
Why he was a true comedian no one could tell, but his very expression and attitude of approach made us laugh.
‘I said, “Porp, where's your whip?” He said, “My 'orse is a good 'orse, 'e don't need no whip!”’ That was all there was to the story. We must have been very young and light-hearted to laugh at it.
The first three days of the journey were spent walking up the river-bed, crossing the stream from side to side to avoid rough going (bluffing, the mountaineers call it). We
Plenty of game fell to the guns as we plodded up the river — a paradise duck, several teal, as many pigeons as we wanted — and the gamin caught a big eel. (Trout had not then been liberated.) Then we started the climb. Sure of plenty of game we cached all tinned foods, carrying with us flour, sugar, tea, salt and rice. We climbed through virgin bush, using hands and knees and dragging ourselves up by the undergrowth. We pushed on valiantly, for not only did we see no camping ground, but my husband had assured us that above the bush (that is, the rain forest) we should also be above the mosquitoes.
It was true. We arrived at nightfall in black birch country, with no undergrowth but thick layers of soft, dry moss covering root and soil, and never an insect visible. We all decided to sleep the clock round.
Our accustomed fare of grilled duck or stewed pigeon was missing. We had seen no game at all that day, though we did see a pair of huia, now said to be extinct. The rice,
The Bicycling TripAt Levin
( H. H. Ostler holds the pony with the author' three childrenThe Family, Levin, 1905Back Row:Front Row:
The men reported having seen the tracks of cattle, so, as we climbed, we put the dogs out but just then an envious wind sprang up, rustling the tree-tops, so that, listen as we would, we could hear no barking to indicate that they had found a mob. After an hour or so the dogs returned exhausted and disgusted plainly saying, ‘Well! Why didn't you come? We did our part, but you let us down.’
My husband had begun to grow anxious about the weather and thought we must not linger. It was still fine but the wind was in the north-west and rain in the hills meant that the river would rise and prevent us from ‘bluffing’ on our way home.
There was easy going in the open country for the last mile or so but the summit was a disappointment. We had looked forward to seeing the west coast with the two long Taranaki bights divided by Egmont, and especially to getting a bird's-eye view of the country with which we were familiar, but clouds enveloped us and wiped out everything. That evening we baked bush scones on sticks to the delight of our town friends.
The slopes near the summit were covered with a tough scrub, so tough and matted so tightly, lying wind-flattened on the ground about three or four feet deep, that you could almost walk on the surface. If it had not been for a well-marked cattle track it would have been hard to hack a path. My brother was striding ahead and we were all in single file behind when a very large boar rushed into the track in his direction. We yelled, the dogs rushed out and he stepped aside just in time. The beast made a lunge at him and grazed his leather leggings. The men called to us to get up as high as possible and we climbed on the wind-blown scrub while they followed the sounds that told where the dogs had
‘It won't be fit to eat,’ said my husband, but we were hungry and insisted that the choicest bit should at least be tried.
We camped again in birch country and stewed pork in small bits for hours, somehow managing to enjoy it. Tastes seemed to have been reversed. My husband, who was not fastidious, couldn't touch it, while Miss Melbourne, who was the dainty one of the party, thought it as good a stew as she had ever eaten.
The men insisted on an early start, and we were halfway down the river when we halted for lunch. They did not stay to shoot game. Tinned food was quicker to prepare, and we were glad we had hidden it on the way up. The dogs were evidently skirmishing on their own for they told us very plainly that they had put up something interesting and, as the sun had come out again, the men felt they might spare ten minutes to see what it was.
‘Here,’ said my husband to the gamin, handing him the slasher he had been using to clear our path, ‘Hang on to this’, and guns in hand both men waded through the river hurriedly and disappeared into the bush opposite.
Mingled squealing and barking announced that pig was the game and there was much rustling and crashing through the bush. Suddenly a half-grown pig half fell and half jumped from the pursuing dogs into the river. In a split second the gamin was waist deep in the water, slashing, with the tool he was holding, like a maniac at the pig. It was swimming away but he followed it and had practically killed it when the guns came up and with laughter and cheers and congratulations rechristened him ‘the game 'un’. (He was an undersized child of twelve.) We carried home most of that pig. It was exactly the size that makes the best pork and wild pig is, of all meats, the most delectable eating.
Safe in bed that night we heard a tremendous thunderstorm rattling round the hills. The rain was torrential. We were home just in time. A night out in that storm would have been far from pleasant.
Note: My mother by this time had bought and sold many sections and so successful were her speculations that she eventually made a reasonable little fortune. She and my sister were able to live in town comfortably and to travel extensively.
Chapter9
Levin and H. H. Ostler
Five years we spent in pioneering conditions at Ohau (not — as you will have gathered — without a sprinkling of fun). Then we were able to buy a farm in Levin, near
Here were born a son and a second daughter. ‘Nursery days and baby ways’ are undoubtedly the best things in a woman's life, though it must strain some of the mothers of to-day to recognise it. I did not realise how sheltered and cared for I was. We were far from opulent. No ship had come in, nor had anyone left us a legacy. We had acquired a home somewhat beyond our means, and therefore had to be the more economical. The house had been built by a friend, Mr Bob Hewitt, a bachelor, whose fancy did not range beyond the front of the house, which was delightful Kitchens he considered redundant — merely the places that made all the work and whence dinners issued. This one was dark, without a sink or a tap or a cupboard, and had a huge, iniquitous range bought from a steamer. You could stoke up all day and merely warm its two great ovens. But what did I care who had cooked in places so much worse. On the contrary. I can remember coming at dusk into that kitchen, seeing the fire from between the bars of the range flicker on the newly-scrubbed board floor, and being seized with a sudden ecstatic pride of possession — this real kitchen, this real built-in range were mine! mine! mine!
You are not to hear much of the seven years we spent at the farm known as The Lake. ‘Happy is the country which has no history’ runs the saying. It applies also to homes of
Levin was still a rough little bush settlement with a butcher, a baker (of sorts) and two stores, one of which acted as a post office. Interesting people were beginning to come and progress was in the air.
Such is the force of old association that many of those early settlers or their descendants remain my friends to this day.
One of the earliest and most acceptable additions to Levin society was the Bartholomew family. Though the sawmill had been working before the Block was sold, it was not until, in his eyes, it had attained some degree of civilisation that Mr Bartholomew built a house and brought his wife and children down to live there. A few months later he took a trip to Australia and brought back a young, half-grown kangaroo. It was the delight of all of us to see the queer animal hopping gracefully and noiselessly among the piles of sawdust round the mill. It made nothing of fences, was perfectly tame and even the mill-hands who had gardens tolerated it amiably.
On still summer evenings, at the edge of the bush one could often see schools of bats circling just above the tree-tops. I had never heard of anyone who had caught one or had even seen one at close quarters till Mr Bartholomew picked up a dead one and took it into his wife, saying, ‘Look! Kangy's had a young one, only it is dead.’
The tiny scrap of grey silk velvet entirely hoaxed the wife whose only lament was that it had not lived. But the very next day, before she had been undeceived, the kangaroo, to the surprise of everyone concerned, did produce a live baby. Now it became more interesting than ever to watch for the mother and see the little head sticking out of her pouch and, later, to see the little fellow hopping beside
It seemed no time before the youngster had grown larger than his mother and the pair could be seen ranging freely wherever they fancied, much at home in anybody's paddock. Soon, disregarding the laws of consanguinity, these two produced a third and, in course of time — I cannot remember how long — there was a herd of five, one male and four females.
One day, driving towards the township, we saw the whole group sitting calmly at the cross-roads, staring round with a lordly air as if they had come out to see how their property was progressing. The horses disliked the sight strangely. They whirled round and bolted in the opposite direction and if I had been driving instead of my husband we should probably have had an accident.
One Sunday afternoon my brother, husband and I were walking across a neighbour's log-strewn paddock. I suppose we had some purpose in view for farmers seldom walk for walking's sake. In fact, it is my opinion that no one less than royalty can afford to indulge in so unproductive a form of exercise. Whatever we may have sought, what we did find was Old Man Kangaroo with his harem. The old lady — the grandmother — had no objection to humans and stood her ground; the old man, perhaps disdaining to be put to flight before his wives, stood and stared defiantly at us.
My husband's Australian blood was roused by the familiar sight. He had a Red Indian's ability to approach a wild thing without startling it and walked steadily to within three or four yards of it. Then, seeing by the stiffening of the leg muscles that the beast was about to spring, he threw his hat, a battered panama, at its head. The hat soared far above its target but the animal rose at the exact second that the hat was above it, and seemed deliberately to thrust its head into the soft hat which closed well down over its head.
The wives bounded off wildly, but the blinded old man could only hop in circles. He must have been able to see a glimpse under the hat, for he always seemed to land either on a smooth patch of grass or on a flat log, but his bounding grew tenser and one could see he was getting more and more furious. Once he looked as if he were coming for us, guided perhaps by loud guffaws, for my brother was quite incapacitated with laughter. But he sheered off and, leaping against a splintered tree, a sliver of which was hanging out horizontally, he knocked off the objectionable hat and, giving us a nasty look, sped after his wives, leaving us all prostrate with laughter.
But the fun was to take a grimmer turn. About twenty hops took the kangaroo to where McHardy's herd of dairy cows was grazing. These, evidently quite accustomed to the Australian visitors, took no notice, but a thirst for vengeance was welling up in Kang's heart. He sprang on to the back of the bull which, with a wild roar, disappeared from our sight. We just caught a glimpse of what looked like the Devil in Cruikshank's illustrations of the Ingoldsby Legends.
The bull, as we heard later, was seriously hurt. Its owners at first were at a loss to guess what had happened. Its flanks were slashed as with a butcher's knife and it had lost much blood. But the worst of the incident was that Old Kang, from that day, developed a taste for rodeo and became a nuisance to all dairymen's herds and even tried horse riding, though he used his spurs less viciously than on his trial ride.
Mr Bartholomew was the last man to allow anything of his to become a nuisance and immediately set about building a large enclosure. It was of boards and wire, and took in some bush as well as grass-land. It must have been an expensive affair, even for a sawmiller. Then the kangaroos had to be driven into it. All the youth and all the dogs of the community volunteered eagerly for the job. It was reported to have been a great hunt and immense fun. But in the morning following it all five kangaroos were lying dead.
* * * *
Levin was short of water — very short. The official map had shown a water reserve and had asserted that it was 110ft. above the level of the town; but the assertion proved a mistake. One hundred and ten feet was the height above sea-level, and it was a poor supply at that.
We, living near the lake, were not in such straits, but it hurt us to see the animals congregating round the gates of their paddocks and when, about four in the afternoon, these were opened, they would stampede, almost gallop, to the lake.
I remembered the water-race scheme in South Canterbury and my husband was interested and felt it might be a solution, but he knew nothing of engineering. One day in Wellington, quite by chance, he met Mr Meason, a Timaru man who had put through the South Canterbury scheme. After talking, he invited Mr Meason to come to Levin to stay with us and reconnoitre.
His report was that though the Government reserve was useless an inexpensive scheme to produce unlimited water could be installed merely by cutting a channel through the lower foothills. The next task was to persuade the ratepayers that such a scheme was possible. They could not believe that races cut through the paddocks would hold the water. What was to prevent its soaking into the soil? Told that such an irrigation scheme had been quite successful in Canterbury, they were still unconvinced. ‘It can't happen here’ was the general attitude. My husband talked, persuaded, harangued. His friends said he would stand with a glass of whisky in one hand, pointing to the landscape with the other, and forget to drink the whisky while talking water. He even took a bicycle trip through the Wairarapa because he read that that district was inaugurating a similar scheme.
At length he persuaded a sufficient number of the ratepayers to vote for a loan, to try the thing out. This could only be achieved by allowing to be cut out of the rate paying area certain well-to-do farmers who had already installed
It is strange, from this distance, to look back on the penury of those days. What an ignorant, primitive, inexperienced little band of pioneers we were, and, considering our proximity to Wellington, how isolated! The explanation, I think, was that nobody had any money to spend. If they had they would not have been there.
The loan that it was so difficult to persuade the district to shoulder was £4,069/3/6, but the settlers were grateful and in 1903, when the scheme was finished, gave my husband a banquet and a watch suitably inscribed.
A few years later, when they found that special rates do not spell ruin if the loans are well spent, the same district cheerfully voted £24,000 for high-pressure water for the homes. These water-races were the first of many benefits that were due, or largely due, to my husband's energy and persistence, but it seemed his luck always to have to fight for what he wanted. Either somebody's jealousy was excited, or somebody's access to pickings was interfered with, or somebody's ‘craft was in danger’ from his activities. I am proud to record that he was never accused of serving the public for his own benefit or of feathering his own nest.
My husband had a remarkable aptitude for games. Whatever came his way he would play with relish and zest. Tennis, cricket, golf, polo, bridge, ping-pong — all grist to his mill. He was never a champion at any of them though often a runner-up and always good enough to give anyone a game. He did not concentrate on any one game — he was a sportsman who played for the joy of it and never forgot that it was a game and not the main business of life.
There was one sport he could have excelled in if it had been competitive; he was an excellent shot. There was a good deal of game about Levin and from time to time he
About this time football became a fashion. My brother, who was then, though without much zest, managing my mother's land, persuaded my husband that he was not too old to help to form a team and to play. Then, stimulated by certain team rivalries, he grew particularly keen. Even I became a football fan and cared tremendously for the glories of a win. A friend recently looked up a biographical dictionary and told me that
Later trout fishing became the rage of the moment. The rivers that had been stocked by the Acclimatization Society were now considered ready to fish and men and women were buying licences and gear for the opening of the season. It was a new sport to most of us.
We now began to realise how near we were to Wellington and to make a few city friends.
My own anti-Liberal opinions may have been formed even earlier. As a child in Dunedin I was sometimes taken to a strawberry garden where once I saw
He had just retired from politics and had been appointed Chief Justice. He was interested in farming, having a part share in a farm in Southland, and enjoyed making comparisons. His life was centred in his work, domestic matters and other things he was content to leave in the hands of his very capable wife. She declared that he was quite hopeless with money. If he started out in the morning with his pockets full he invariably found some impostor or undeserving charlatan who wheedled it all from him. He could never withstand a tale of woe. Apart from this he had no extravagances. He did not drink, smoke or gamble nor did he even play games. When from the platform he advocated prohibition and total abstinence and an interjector shouted, ‘You'll dock our tea next!’ he answered, smiling, ‘Well, and why not? Myself I take neither tea, coffee nor cocoa and find myself in perfect health.’ His type suggested the old Scottish disciplinarian but after knowing
We saw more of his charming wife than of him. She stayed often at Cashmere. She was vital, impressive, graceful and decorative and full to overflowing with the milk of human kindness. Her hair was a nimbus of spun gold round her head. The ‘perming’ of to-day may aim at producing the effect artificially but the real thing is rare indeed. She was cruelly deaf but she handled her ear-trumpet with such appealing grace that she made it almost an ornament.
She was frank to a degree and that she did not often give mortal offence was due not so much to her sweet disposition as to the ingenuous sincerity with which she said things other people would have left unsaid.
I remember a day at our house when we women sat long over the luncheon table. The conversation had turned on one's conception of the life after death. One of my guests was
* * * *
The Boer War brought football to an abrupt close. Most
Perhaps the keynote of
He had worked during the first part of the university vacation in 1903, accumulated a little cash and was now frothing for a spot of fun. He said to my sister and me: ‘If you girls could do the thing cheaply enough we might take a bicycle trip to the Hot Springs.’ What a suggestion!
Of course we assured H.H. that we could do the trip as cheaply as he could. Why not? It seemed he had £5, which was all he could spare, probably all he had. He asked anxiously if each of us could take the like sum and manage on it. We, with the valour of ignorance, were sure of it; but my husband shook his head and insisted on my taking a surreptitious cheque hidden away for an emergency. I afterwards found that my sister had stitched two sovereigns inside her coat lining.
We made ourselves short, heavy serge skirts exactly alike and a navy-and-white blouse to be worn with a red tie and belt. We bought mushroom hats with red frills. The skirts were shockingly short; they came only just to the ankles, so of course it would be impossible to appear in civilised places, or even to stay with friends, without a change. We each took a black skirt (mine had a train) and a white silk blouse. These and a change of underclothing comprised the whole swag, which we strapped on to the handlebars.
We had friends with whom we were to stay the first two nights. The test came on the third night, when we arrived about nightfall at a small township and were confronted with the choice of a good hotel and a very bad boarding-house. We agreed at once that we must take the cheaper. But when we saw the boarding-house our hearts quailed. I believe that it would be impossible to find its fellow in New Zealand to-day for dirt and revolting smells. We looked at each other, no one wishing to be the first to renounce our boasted economy and declare the place too noisome. I don't remember who was the brave one but we finally stayed at the well-kept hotel.
The next was Waiouru, a coach-stop only. A large dining-shed with a wooden floor and some bedrooms that were merely a huddle of packing-cases was our resting-place. You could poke a hat-pin from one room to the other. Except
My brother made enquiries (we well-behaved women did not dream of speaking to strange men and there were no women). He was told that we must start early if we were to reach Tokaanu. It was forty miles without a sign of life. H.H. was anxious, for he had been led to believe that no one had yet crossed the Waiouru Plains on cycles and to take two women was a risk.
We did not reach
H.H. said, ‘You girls needn't take off your shoes and stockings. I'll carry you over to save time.’
It meant five crossings for him to carry us and our cycles; after each he jumped about swearing that it was devilish cold. Coming to another stream we thought it quicker each to go alone. Then we knew why he had hopped about; the cold actually burnt.
‘I'm glad you two had a taste of it,’ laughed H.H. ‘You showed me very little sisterly sympathy.’
It was toilsome going until we came in sight of the great blue expanse of
But when we reached the flats where Tokaanu should be there was no sign of habitation and night was falling.
What to do? Push on over a very rough road?
‘Let's camp,’ said H.H. ‘It's an ideal place.’
We had no blanket but each had a warm coat. My evening skirt was of heavy moire, lined with sateen. My
We slept well although we wakened cold just as dawn was breaking. We packed up and rode on to get warm till in response to the demands of the man of the party, who was never tired but always hungry, we boiled up the billy and ate the last of our ship's biscuits. Tokaanu, had we known it, was just round the corner and very soon we were enjoying our first hot mineral bath.
We found that, because it was New Year's Day, the boat, the only means of crossing to Taupo, was to call at various points round the lake before returning, but if we cared to take the trip with it we were welcome. Nothing could have suited us better. When it came in we were surprised to see it crowded with passengers and more surprised to see empty baskets, preserving-pans, tins, boxes and washing tubs lying thick on the deck but we were too busy enjoying the scene to speculate about this. We came to a cove that was enveloped in red mist. One of the passengers told us they were cherries and that the residents of Taupo arranged a picnic every New Year's Day to gather them.
H.H. had picked up a young fellow-student who had stayed that night at the Tokaanu hotel and was also crossing to Taupo. We four, when we had landed, sat alone on the white sand that looked like brewer's crystals, eating cherries. The local people spread a large cloth and unpacked a feast — cold turkeys, geese, fowls, salads and what looked like dishes filled with trifle. The young student had nothing to eat and we, thinking to be in Taupo for lunch, had one ship's biscuit and a scrape of marmalade. I wanted to go and tell the revellers that we had not understood the arrangements and had brought no lunch but the others would by no means
We stayed in a luxurious hotel that night and enjoyed every minute of it for we knew it would be our last for some time. We had learnt something. We had discovered that not only could we sleep under the stars but could revel in it. Henceforth the going was perfect bliss. We did not try to reach any destination at a set time. We bought biscuits and butter and paste and marmalade as opportunity offered. It seldom offered all three at one time — and we had a meal whenever we found ourselves near one at the right time. We loitered where things pleased us. We spent two days at Waimungu which had been discovered only a week previously. There was no accommodation, but dozens of people came out from Rotorua by the day and an enterprising woman made a shelter from which to sell cups of tea. The ‘greatest geyser’ didn't oblige us with a shot, though two schoolboys, leaving as we arrived, had seen it go up a thousand feet.
At Rotorua we felt opulent enough to stay at ‘Lake House’, then the best hotel there. We grew bored with thermal wonders and rode on to Tauranga which we all agreed to be the most delightful place we had seen.
On the way home we met two cyclists stuck in the sand-drift on the Waiouru Plains. They were loaded with everything campers could desire — a tent, bedding, saucepans, tinned meat, rice, dried apples, fancy biscuits — and were now quarrelling furiously as to which items they should jettison, for they could get no further with their load. They were worn out. One was a Wesleyan parson but he was in a very unchristian temper. To my brother, a few feet away, he denounced his travelling-companion as a fool, a shirker without pluck and now showing himself a greedy swine. It
The other fellow poured his troubles into our ears. It was this silly parson who had suggested taking so much encumbrance. ‘Would you believe it, he even took a toothbrush.’
They were aghast when we showed them what we carried — tea and sugar, a few square biscuits and if possible something to spread on them, all packed inside the billy. A sheath-knife and a a hatchet, a few nails and some string, were my brother's special addition. We didn't show them our change nor confess that we had taken toothbrushes.
H.H. helped them a little and received from them a piece of copper wire, for one of the links of the chain of my bicycle had broken. It had not mattered much so far for the road had been uphill but it was soon going to be a great inconvenience. He mended it with twisted strands of copper wire which pressed themselves into a solid link and lasted long after I reached home.
Once out of the wilds I began to feel homesick. Perhaps we all felt the same for we whirled along the metalled roads in great style, quickening the pace as we grew nearer Levin and the crowning moment was when from our own front gate I saw my dear husband playing with golf sticks on the lawn with the three children round him. We had been away three weeks; we had seen the unique thermal regions; we had each a few shillings left in our pockets and were well pleased with ourselves.
Nevertheless, we did not tell our mother everything we had done. What we revealed shocked her quite enough. She said that she was prepared for asceticism but not for barbarism; and even my husband didn't seem pleased with some of the details but he was bound to own that he had never seen me — nor indeed any of us — looking so fit.
The winter following that trip we enjoyed an orgy of playgoing. I am afraid that you will gather that our lives consisted in the pursuit of pleasure. Indeed it was not so. My brother and husband were both noted for their energy and industry. I was a worker too, but women in those times were freer and not expected to be tied to their homes except when the children were quite young.
Good companies visited New Zealand then. Gilbert and Sullivan were new to me but my husband told of a time in Sydney when he was earning ten shillings a week, and spent six of them for eight weeks running, to see Nellie Stewart in Patience. So, when a good company was expected we must certainly see it. He knew some of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas almost by heart, but enjoyed them only the more for that. He could not spare more than two nights but my brother and I wanted more, so I stayed on in town and we went every night in the pit. H.H. got round the caretaker (those were easy times) to let us in early, as early as six o'clock, and he would study till the curtain went up. He chose subjects that would interest me — Anglo-Saxon, Chaucer, Malory — and flattered me by saying I was a help to him. How proud I was when, occasionally, I could unravel a passage just before he did. Then a good opera company came — Lempria Pringle and Mme Slapofski — and we saw the old classics in the same plebeian way.
My husband was always a theatre fan, but I had never been inside a theatre until after we were married except for one occasion in Timaru, when
I enjoyed now everything that came, even the most sentimental melodramas. When Nellie Stewart came my husband could not resist her, even in her old age. What is
By 1909 motor-cars had come to stay, but they were by no means common. The music hall turn about ‘Bits of Ma and bits of Pa’ that filled the air after an explosion because they had dared to ride ‘upon a motor-car’ was still popular. The local doctor had bought a queer contraption. I, with a Wellington friend who was staying with me, spent the evening at his house, but when he offered to drive us home she shrieked, ‘No! No!’ and ran out of the house, determined to walk. When the car overtook her she was running towards home for dear life, crying, as the car slowed down, ‘I'm a married woman. I'm a married woman with three children. Go away,’ and I was obliged to walk with her. She was by no means as freakish as might seem from this distance.
So when we heard that my brother, who had been practising less than three years, had bought, had actually bought, a car, we were duly excited and very sure that law paid better than farming. I have said H.H. was a man of strong desires. I recalled that when a mite of six he had set his heart on a tricycle. He did nothing so crude as to beg or pester for it, he simply lived day and night in the thought of it, never letting his mind stray. A slope in the road was to him a grand place for a tricycle; a colour was either good or bad for a tricycle; a sum of money was simply part of what a tricycle would cost. He wore his mother down.
I had no doubt that he had worn himself down in the same manner over the car. He had bought a second-hand
He wrote that he was driving to Wanganui, that he would stay with us the first night, would bring the younger daughter home from school and would drive on the following day. He suggested that if any of us cared to go to Palmerston he would like to drive us there and leave us to return by train.
Can a duck swim? The proposition suited me exactly and my son, aged fourteen, wished to come too.
The arrival was slightly dampened by the fact that the schoolgirl daughter, so far from enjoying her new experience, was a limp piece of misery, having been car-sick all the way. When we had attended to her we all gathered round the wonder.
H.H. explained that though she had been badly smashed a firm of young mechanics — very clever fellows — had practically remade her and he believed she was a better thing than she had been the day she left England. We had no doubt about it. We stood admiring while he talked technicalities that the males seemed to understand, and dilated on the way these machines could devour the miles and fly up hills. He had read everything written about cars. That was his way.
He impressed on us that we must make an early start in the morning, at seven sharp, because he simply must reach Palmerston by mid-day. Sixty miles — we thought it was cutting it fine.
At crack of dawn there was a noise like the rending of earth and sky. It was H.H. starting up the car to make sure she was ready for the road. He re-dusted and re-polished every inch and would hardly look at breakfast nor allow anyone else to eat much. Soon, amid ecstatic barking of dogs, much dust and more noise, we reached the road, making a great pace. It must have been quite twenty miles an hour.
The roads of that day were narrow and heavily cambered. Turning a corner, we came on a draught horse straining awkwardly to drink from water below the road. At the sight and sound of us it dragged itself back with difficulty before galloping away in alarm. The car had to pull up to avoid running into the horse as it straightened itself.
‘Tch! Tch!’ murmured the driver. ‘That's the sort of thing that spoils your record.’
Record! If we were breaking records this must be a better car than we had imagined. We sped on till we came to an eight-foot-wide road, or track, of gritty red sandstone. It was a vile road — red dust with large lumps of stone interspersed.
‘There's sure not to be much of it,’ said my optimistic brother.
We had enquired of the Levin doctor and he had advised us to take this route. Later we had cause to wonder whether it was his idea of a scurvy joke. We bumped and lurched and rolled back and forth at a foot pace, till there was a long, shrill, whistling sound.
‘Puncture!’ cried H.H., almost pleased to announce it as it gave him the chance of showing the efficiency of the stepney wheel.
He lifted the seat, displaying a plethora of neatly-packed tools, and aided by Lloyd, who seemed to know a certain amount by instinct, he took off the damaged wheel, screwed on the stepney (it was easier than changing a modern tyre) and without much delay we resumed our slow progress.
‘Just look over the side, Nell, and see whether there is another tyre gone. She's devilish hard to steer.’
I looked and reported that the tyre was quite flat.
‘It's not so easy this time,’ he admitted. ‘It has to be mended in the same way as a bicycle. But I have a spare tube.’
Never say die. I volunteered to walk back for the jack while the man and boy tugged and strained at the car to shift the weight from the damaged wheel.
I soon found that all the tools had been left on the running-board, for I found them one by one lying along the wayside, the jack last of all, just where it had been used.
It was, if I remember rightly, 21 December and an unusually hot day. Tired and thirsty, we spoke with relish of the prospect of a meal in Foxton. But H.H. assured us that he really couldn't possibly wait and finally owned awkwardly that there was a girl waiting for him on the railway platform at Palmerston. Her train came in at twelve. He simply must be there. To his joy we issued on to a metalled road and soon whirled through Foxton, Lloyd and I looking hungrily at the pie-shops but the driver kept his anxious eyes glued on the road.
A few million dogs rushed out to express their enmity towards horseless vehicles. We feared we had run over one, and H.H. said, ‘That might cost me a fiver but it's better than losing time. We'll do it yet.’
Then, all of a sudden, a newly metalled road stretched before us with raw, freshly knapped grey stone, clean and new and sharp as broken glass, without so much as a shovel of earth to bind it. It seemed to stretch to the horizon. One groan, long and loud, issued from three throats. After one venomous and blasphemous curse on the Doctor H.H. decided that calmness would be helpful.
The tyres of that day were poor affairs. In fact, the whole future of the internal combustion engine as a means of road transport rested on the making of stronger tyres.
We investigated the sides of the road and found there was nothing to do but push slowly on and trust to luck. Almost immediately a tyre punctured. My brother's spirits
‘If we could only come to water to cool the radiator,’ he said.
There was a whare on a hill some distance back from the road. I offered to take the car's can and bring water while the others emptied the rusty water and looked into the engine to see if the heat had damaged anything. I found a woman just making tea. At first, on account of time, I refused her invitation to join her, but ultimately succumbed and swallowed a quick one — two quick ones — before speeding down with the water. They drank some greedily and poured in the rest and we sped on in dread. Mercifully, the next time the radiator boiled there was a swamp near the road where the can could be filled.
At last we came in sight of Sanson railway station. It was just a shed and a platform with one man in charge.
During the worst of our tribulations H.H. had said, ‘As soon as we reach Sanson I'll put the car on the train and we'll all get there by rail in the end.’
The stationmaster laughed. It would take perhaps three days for a suitable truck to be delivered. There was but one train per day, due shortly.
H.H. was desperate and asked for the telephone and rang a garage in Palmerston.
This was lordly in the extreme — four new tyres and a man to put them on!
‘Holy cats,’ exclaimed his young nephew, ‘Uncle must be a millionaire.’
We began then to think of creature comforts, but there were no shops, nor refreshment-places. We found a delightful little stream and sitting on its bank washed the dust off our shoes and dangled our tired feet in the water. H.H. had leisure to be his usual kindly self. He praised our strength and pluck and was half apologetic for all the trouble
‘You couldn't help it,’ I said. ‘The stars in their courses fought against us.’
Suddenly his pent-up feelings found vent in the words of Deborah's bloodthirsty song:
‘The stars in their courses fought against Sisera The river of Kishon swept them away … Curse ye Meroz … curse ye bitterly … [I think he meant the Doctor] Blessed above women shall Jael … be He asked water, and she gave him milk, She brought forth butter in a lordly dish. She put her hand to the nail….’
After that we sat with our feet in the stream, taking turns at reciting our favourites. Suddenly my brother sprang up.
‘That confounded garage man ought to be here by now.’
We all ran out to the road to look for the cloud of dust that should herald his coming. No sign, and, after a while, Lloyd and I returned to the cool mint bank but he stayed on the road gazing and fuming.
At last he went again to borrow the telephone and came to us with the final blow of the day. The garage had not the
At the Palmerston station our train was standing, ready for five o'clock to strike.
‘I think,’ pressed H.H., ‘that you'll just have time to say a word to Miss D—.’ But we had time only to note a dejected female wilting on the baking platform.
‘All seats, please’, and Lloyd and I had to dash frantically down the platform and hurl ourselves into the first carriage.
‘Anyway, we had a better time than the girl on the platform,’ panted the tired boy, and I agreed.
Chapter10
Further Afield
After we had had seven happy, prosperous years at The Lake the firm of Abraham and Williams, for whom my husband was working at the time, wanted him to go to
My husband took many jaunts to the King Country buying store cattle for fattening on the rich Manawatu flats and one day returned to say he had bought a place there. It was a Maori lease of some four thousand acres which had once been broken-in and grassed and even yet was in good order compared with the rest of the King Country.
He did not propose that we should live there, at least until he had acquired the freehold and had built a house. An old house was there and he would put a manager on or perhaps a married couple. I was all agog to see the new venture and was planning to go north as soon as possible when my man of surprises came home again with some much more exciting news — he had been asked to stand for Parliament, representing the electorate of which
I was lucky in finding an English family who wanted a three-months holiday in the country and I let Closeacre to them while my mother, then living in Wellington, took my younger daughter. So I packed at the end of October and took train for
The soil was pumice so the roads were fairly dry except when it was actually raining but full of deep holes — almost ponds. A short time before, these holes had been filled with Maori pigs, wallowing, squealing and cumbering up the roads. These had now been banished and some of the holes filled in, but no one dared walk at night without a lantern, for there were no street lights. Nor was there any water supply except for a few tanks. I have seen river water carried in kerosene tins by enterprising boys, who would sell it to the dwellers in half-built houses — for cash was the only amenity not in short supply.
The Auckland-Wellington expresses crossed at
It was said that every second man in the place was a land agent. It would never do for one of these to miss the two o'clock trains. Some other fellow might annex a precious client who should have been yours. Every man who looked as if he might be a buyer stepping from the carriage was pounced upon by a pack of land agents. The agent who secured the prize found him lodgings or offered him hospitality and, if possible, kept him closely in sight till he had sold him ‘the only absolute bargain in the King Country’, probably an undrainable swamp or an unscaleable precipice. Sometimes a wag, with his tongue in his cheek, turned the tables on the wolves and enjoyed a good time, being driven round and entertained and shouted for, without any more intention of buying land than I had.
Later, when we had for a time a furnished house in
My husband being away ‘out back’, I spent the first ten days at the boarding-house. (We called it the hotel because there were no licensed houses.) There were eight or nine women doing the same — playing ladies while their husbands toiled long hours. These introduced me to Te Kuiti Society, with a very big S. And what a frilly, dressy, fashionable, refined society it was! So far from waving any of the conventions because of its transient character, these they doubly riveted.
On the first Sunday evening I went to church with the gay ladies of the hotel. Near us sat a plainly — even shabbily — dressed man and woman. They were quietly absorbed in the service, having no eyes for the finely-attired congregation. I recognised them at once as kindred spirits, people I understood and could like. After we came out I enquired about them and was told: ‘Oh! Those are Mr and Mrs Spencer. He's putting in the new waterworks. They are toffs. They're real toffs, but they won't be here long.’
Another added encouragingly, ‘If your husband gets into Parliament you might get to know them.’
Of course this pretentious little coterie was not the whole, or even representative, of
As always, it was the country people who nourished and gave life to the town. About once a month, at week-ends, they left their lonely out-back sections to draw a breath among their fellows. As their mud-covered vehicles drew up
And what a task
We rode, I think, some seven miles until he met us — a mud man riding a mud horse. The road was from one foot to three feet deep in slush. Sometimes the horse stepped into a hole and I wondered if it would really be able, this time, to pull itself out.
It was quite impossible for a horse to travel faster than a walk. Then I pictured the hundreds of such miles my husband had struggled and flopped through, for he had ridden into every small settlement, crossing and recrossing his tracks. I doubt if there are many men with enough physical endurance to have canvassed that electorate. My husband had a special ability to get the best out of a horse. Though a heavy man, he ‘rode light’, and he did the whole campaign with two horses.
But for the best bit of fun on earth, commend me to an election, especially if you win it. Every stage of it is stimulating and exciting, and the jokes seem so irresistibly funny.
For instance, when the candidate, through ignorance of local matters, has chosen as chairman a smart but shady character submerged in debt, and when carefully explaining a point of public finance, says, ‘You see, the thing is not sound. Now, Mr Chairman, if I lend you a thousand pounds….’
‘Don't you do it, C.K.,’ says someone in the audience and the room rocks with laughter — all the more so as the candidate is at a loss to know what it is all about.
When the opposition candidate says, ‘This Reform Party, it was once called the Conservative Party, then the Opposition, now the Reform Party. What will it be called next?’ A voice: ‘The Government, of course.’
The thrill of watching the numbers go up amid cheers and the exaltation of the following morning with friends' congratulations, when the comedian supporter drawls, ‘You
We took a furnished house in
* * * *
It was after returning to Closeacre when the exciting flutter of the election in the King Country was over, that we knew the man who is now Governor-General of New Zealand. He was hardly more than a youth and full to the brim with boyish enthusiasms. His work, dentistry, did not provide him with the exercise he considered his constitution needed, so he made it up with perpetual motion all the remaining hours.
He beat up a group of young men to form a Cadet Corps. It must have been uphill work, for the long years of peace made us feel that war with a civilized nation belonged to the unthinkable past. Great Illusion which most people took to mean that war was henceforth impossible. But Freyberg's enthusiasm brought a small corps into being. To use his own quotation, ‘He hauled them all together by the horn and hide and leather’ and drilled them on Friday nights between seven and eight. It happened that we had a couple of bridge fours on Friday evening. That he might not keep us waiting, he used to sprint all the way, and however punctually we started he was always in time.
On fine Sundays Levin used to picnic at the seven-miles-distant beach. It was usual for the country people who had horses and traps to offer seats to the townspeople. One could lend a mount, one could offer a couple of seats. This young athlete would accept neither. He never had sufficient exercise, he said, so he would run both ways.
He left no doubt in the minds of his friends that he intended to do big things in life. To swim the Channel was the target of the moment. He had been champion swimmer of New Zealand at sixteen. We smiled, as one smiles at
‘Yes! I lived on ten shillings a week and I'll never look a rabbit in the face again.’ For a sports-lover with extremely sociable temperament to cut himself off from the life of the university and study in a lonely cabin on a diet of rabbit is not a feat to be overlooked.
He felt he had missed the opportunity of his life in not being included in the Scott expedition. He knew the name of every man on both ships, their life history and why they had secured a berth. When the news of the disaster came out he would talk and think of nothing else. It hurt him to know that a mere foreigner had succeeded where one fine Britisher had failed. To say that Amundsen ran a fair race and must therefore be the better polar explorer was, in his view, high treason.
The essence of a race, he would insist, is that both parties know that it is a race. No! It was a dirty trick to sneak off like that. It was that beastly Norwegian flag planted at the Pole that killed
I remember that he stirred up young Levin to enter for swimming sports, boys and girls together, dressed in bathing suits that to-day would appear ultra-modest. How these shocked the Levin matrons, and I will own that I had enough Victorian prudery to have wished that somebody else's daughters, rather than mine, had been the performers. The public, some of the public, were shocked on other lines. One old woman ran about in great excitement, crying, ‘They'll get the galloping consumption, every one of 'em. There won't none of 'em live to see next Christmas.’
It did not occur to me at the time but I have since
us that he was called ‘Tiny’ because he was the smallest of three brothers and we used the name quite often, but to the people at Levin he was
* * * *
Was ever a new member so full of zeal, so keen, so deadly in earnest about the work before him as this
But C.K. refused to be amused. He would have no truck with cynicism. I had become almost as keen, so these parliamentary years should have been the climax of both our lives.
I had become entirely absorbed in politics and I felt I was able to help my husband substantially by reading up and making précis of such things as proportional representation which was one of the planks of
‘A hundred and forty head of cattle short in one year. Something wrong. Something very wrong.’
I was enjoying the Library because the librarians were particularly good to me, introducing me to books that I should not have known existed. There was, especially, a row of stodgy-looking tomes called Arber's Reprints. They were a collection of first-hand accounts of voyages and discoveries and other incidents that had survived since the days of Henry VIII. Some were absurd travellers' tales but the sheets were the precursors of our daily papers and the raw material of history, so hard to come by. I found that Kingsley had taken Salvation Yeo's story almost word for word from two of these reprints.
When our Party succeeded to the Treasury Benches I still delayed at Plimmerton until the end of May when we took rooms at Kenilworth. My younger daughter was with us and arrangements were made for the two elder children to come when the university and school holidays came round.
I'll hardly be believed when I tell you that this luxury cost us less than it would cost one person to live on the same scale to-day. Four pounds ten a week for the three permanents and thirty shillings for the holiday son and daughter.
It was perfect bliss. At functions one merely meets everyone but now I grew to know some of the interesting personalities. Tom (later
F. M. B. Fisher, the youngest Member in the House, was the wittiest and most entertaining. He had a story against
He was chronically hard-up but he wrote them a beautiful letter saying that he had only done his duty, that to be paid for that duty was a thing no self-respecting Member would dream of. He therefore with thanks returned the cheque. But he returned his own cheque which was worth exactly nothing and kept theirs.
I have held a theory that, left to free selection, men and women always (or nearly always) marry their equals, not in wealth, brains, social status or moral integrity, but in all qualities, if these could be weighed on divine scales. I tested it on the wives of the Members and found it sound. We would assemble in the Ladies' Gallery. I only discovered to whom I was speaking as we talked. I would say to my husband, ‘Mrs Lee seems to me a splendid woman. What is he like?’
‘Oh, he's one of the shining lights. He will be a Minister if he sticks to it.’
And vice versa. If I talked to a particularly futile ass I would surely find her husband of the same calibre. Of course my theory is not infallible but then we can't always gauge the qualities of our friends. We are on surer ground with our relations.
Though I had missed the first rejoicings there were still gaieties. Every day there were so many invitations that it was difficult to decide which to reject and which to accept.
I enjoyed every minute of that month. The gaiety lasted just one month and then the war came and everything closed down with a bang. Wellington took the war very seriously at first. The women, we were told, must knit. Hardly anyone knitted at that time. Among the forty at Kenilworth there was but one Scotch ‘body’ who knew the art. All through the house you could hear her giving lessons. ‘Knit one, pearrrel one.’ I intended to learn too, but the War Department
The Prohibitionists, who then formed the majority of the voters of the Dominion, were urging that a three-fifths majority was too high a target, and that the issue should be decided, if not by a bare majority, at least by a reduced one.
J. Wall, who had been C.K.'s most influential supporter at the election, had said, ‘Look, Charlie, you're a fool to vote for this Bill. I know you're not too keen yourself; why not drop it?’
‘I've promised,’ was the careless answer.
The next day the same emissary came to him with a definite proposal — the Trade would pay all his election expenses for the coming encounter. They would guarantee he would get in. They would spend money and do the job much better than he could do it.
That was only too true. Those voluntary committees are full of momentary zeal, but when the shouting and the tumult dies they fail to do much work. Many a time, though someone had promised to make all arrangements, the candidate, after plodding through thirty miles of mud, had arrived at a settlement to find a handful of men hanging about and asking him where the meeting was to be held. He must then go himself and borrow the school key and a lamp and often without a meal give the evening talk.
Also, the election over, bills came in to the Member for cases of whisky, smoke concerts and shakedowns which he had believed provided by his followers. He could do nothing but pay and be silent.
However, my husband was incorruptible and never for a moment entertained the idea of selling his vote.
The next day the offer had risen — election expenses, plus two hundred pounds.
Nothing doing.
The eldest daughter was at Kenilworth then and each day as he came into lunch we asked him with our eyes what the latest offer amounted to. He would put up three fingers, then four, then five. In a few days it had risen to eight hundred pounds plus election expenses. The next day no fingers were shown. They had found cheaper support.
I don't think I was base enough to deliberately want my husband to yield, but the daughter and I often talked of what the bribe would do for us. We could even have taken a trip to England between sessions. Jim Wall had said, ‘You don't need to change your mind, Charlie. Just go to
Previously, votes in the House had been counted and it was known for certain that there was at least a majority of two in the entire House who had given election pledges to support the Bill. When the night came there was a majority of five against it. Three Members had surprisingly missed their trains. One particularly ardent Prohibitionist who, with his wife, had lived during the whole three sessions of that Parliament at an expensive hotel, had paid the proprietor never a penny. It was common knowledge that his creditors were anxiously awaiting the close of the House that they might take proceedings against him. He was not only able to pay his debts but to buy himself a flourishing bicycle business, thus ending a short but profitable political career. The smartest and shiftiest Member of the House simply voted against the Bill, explaining to his constituents that he was so sincerely devoted to the principle of a bare majority that he could not bring himself to vote for a compromise.
I have no intention of conveying the impression that Members of Parliament were at that time constantly corrupt or even that they were often offered the opportunity for making illicit gains. This ‘Forty-five fifty-five’ Bill was, in fact, the only occasion on which I saw, or even heard about, corruption.
* * * *
Of all the changes that have taken place during my long life perhaps the most fundamental is the altered place in the world occupied by women. Before the Married Women's Property Act she was legally a chattel, herself, her property and even her children belonged to her husband; and the spirit engendered by the past status of the sexes was plainly to be seen in my young days. Yet, in spite of financial and other difficulties, most women managed to hold their own. A dominant spirit will always dominate. Duff Cooper considers that at the end of the eighteenth century women, especially in Paris, ‘were great ladies, the leaders of talk as well as of ethics, politics and of all the arts. No man could rise to prominence except against the background of a salon, and over every salon a woman ruled. The years that have since elapsed have witnessed what is called the “enfranchisement of woman”; but neither from the polling-booth nor from her seat in Parliament, has she so far succeeded in exercising the same control over the lives of men or the fate of nations as was hers when she remained the centre of a select circle in her own drawing-room.’ True! But he spoke of the beautiful, the charming, the privileged. Legal status is for every woman.
The suffragettes excused their excesses on the ground that it was necessary to fight for all womankind. It is a mistake to believe that New Zealand women were given the vote before they even demanded it. There was a great deal of agitation and much fighting against opposition and ridicule before
I would shelter behind Tennyson's words:
‘The woman's cause is man's, They rise or sink together.’
I had no excuse. I ought to have been in the fight. Yet I believe that the fight they put up had less to do with women's altered status than had ulterior circumstances over which they had no control — two wars where women's help was needed and also the discovery of birth control, especially this. When my husband told me of that discovery I felt it to be the death-knell of the British Empire. I argued that it had been the younger sons and those lacking opportunity at Home, and coming to the ends of the earth to ‘win to hearth and saddle of their own’ who had built the Empire.
My husband did not agree nor did
* * * *
It was during the first year of the war that
I demurred, but I was clay in her hands. A deaf person in the street holds all the cards. One cannot argue so I soon found myself in a well-filled hall, sitting on
Voted to the chair,
Then the meeting had to decide which reform should first engage its attention. Mrs Peter Fraser (a woman of great sincerity and ability) rose to suggest that the treatment of conscientious objectors could be a suitable subject for our earliest investigations. We had all heard rumours concerning the rough treatment these unfortunates were receiving in Wanganui gaol, but war-fever was raging and had made us callous. Mrs Fraser, it seemed, had some information to offer, but her voice was drowned by interjections, some hostile, some encouraging and some protesting against disorder. The chairman was at a loss to guess why the meeting that had been so orderly and harmonious had suddenly become a donnybrook. She put her trumpet to her ear and turned to me for information, but I, knowing what her reaction would be, had leaned over and was eagerly talking to the woman on my right.
The meeting was in an uproar. Except for those who had surreptitiously slipped out when the trouble began everyone was trying to be heard, either protesting or defending or pleading for decent behaviour. Finally, we all found ourselves gathered into kindred groups issuing into the street, laughing or raging according to our several natures.
Chapter11
The King Country
The session over, my husband hurried north. There was no doubt now that things were going very badly and that the manager must go. The trouble was that a badly-worded agreement allowed him to claim the privileges of a partner, and partnerships are difficult to dissolve. After much worry and harassing negotiations it cost over £1,000 to get rid of him. The estate had to be sold and my husband had to buy in what he wanted of it. This was a very bad set-back, but prices were rising and my husband was always buoyant. He lost the second election. He was not able to put his heart into it as he had into the first.
During these vexatious delays I took a furnished house, first in
The journey, in 1916, from
The dwelling was unattractive enough but its precincts were infinitely worse. They were unspeakable. The house stood in a sea of mud. Every animal seemed to have to walk past the back door several times a day. The horses were — or had been — fed to the right but paddocked to the left; the cows paddocked on the left were milked on the right. The mud was often knee-deep. Stepping-stones alone made it possible for me to step outside. My husband had just built a woolshed, but previously the woolshed had been less than a chain from the back door. At shearing time the sheep had actually been penned against the house, baaing all night and raising a dust that one could feel between the teeth.
But there were compensations. Mrs Hunt, who had lived there before our disastrous married couple, had been a real gardener and had planted in quantity everything that could live in the climate. The Garden of Eden could hardly have held more of the kindly fruits of the earth — grapes, peaches, plums, quinces, pears, walnuts and the small fruits, including large patches of the dear old gooseberry that is never sick and never sorry.
The grapes and one kind of plum were said to have been brought there by
What has happened to New Zealand that no such patches of plenty can be found to-day? Blights! and the birds brought to prevent the blights. It seems to me that they both came simultaneously and one is as bad as the other.
The fruits that grew in the greatest profusion seemed to blight first, quinces, peaches and one variety of grape, but gradually almost everything was infected except the small fruits, and the birds attended to them. There, as well as everywhere else, a gardener must now live with a spraypump in his hands if he is to grow fruit.
All this plenty delighted me, especially as it was the only homestead within miles that had been long enough established to have grown as much as a gooseberry. Neighbours used to come for fruit with sledges and packhorses. Even now the grapes can be wonderful. An occasional season comes when neither bird nor man can cope with the crop.
When I came there was absolutely no road to the place and the irony of it was that once that homestead had been the centre of King Country civilisation. Such people as dwelt in those wilds before the railway had been mooted (and there were some even then) used to assemble there to hold backblock dances in the old woolshed. These were, I am told, real backblock hops. The men in muddy corduroys and hob-nail boots danced in turn with the few women who were the only available partners.
There had been a road then, or rather a wheel-track, that wound over hill and dale, and through possible and impossible fords, leading ultimately through Otorohanga to the Waikato. It is natural that when surveyors cut up the land for closer settlement they should take no notice of such a road.
So the homestead that had been the centre to which all tracks led was now approached through a maze of paddocks with eight clumsy gates, each harder to open than the next. It has happened in other districts that new settlement has turned the old centres into isolated backblocks.
And here let me remark that I have discovered that nobody ever lives in the backblocks. It is always the other fellow whose lot it is to live there. The most isolated will tell you of someone further back who ‘really lives in the backblocks’, but when you arrive at this further outpost the dwellers will point to a road or a telegraph pole or mention a neighbour that renders the place ‘not really backblocks, you know’. It is true that a farmer may refer deprecatingly to his farm as in the backblocks — just as a woman may refer to herself as old — but tactful friends do not corroborate.
I was soon disabused of the flattering notion that we were pioneering again. Our neighbours in much more primitive conditions made no such claim. In fact, more than one of them told me that they had been living out back but had ‘come in’ in order to be near a school for the children. There certainly was a shed used as a school in
One neighbour left his wife and daughters in Hamilton while he and his sons felled the bush on their sections. He would sometimes spend the week-end with his wife, return on the only passenger train, that which arrived in
Roads! Roads! There was the great problem of King Country settlement. Sheep-farmers and graziers like ourselves might tolerate the conditions but the small holders, whose cream must be marketed and stores brought in at least bi-weekly, were in a sorry plight. My husband was obsessed with the problem, not ours, but theirs. He was full of tragic stories of the hardship and even danger they constantly faced. He spoke and wrote and worried about it continually. During his time in the House he had made up his mind that he would never speak on any subject whatever without, in some way, mentioning ‘roads for the back-blocks’. And, indeed, he had made the words something of a slogan, at least within the Reform Party. Yet, in our district, very little had been done. The difficulty was lack of suitable metal. Much money was wasted in forming roads, a method that had worked well enough in some districts, but here — in Taumarunui, as the electorate was then called — the exceptionally heavy rainfall made the roads as impassable as ever as soon as the summer was over. The County Council, with Government help, solved the problem at last by crushing the limestone rock for metal.
The reluctance of the Government to come to the rescue of the roadless settlers was understandable. Hitherto the roading system of New Zealand had been worked by each district rating itself. Those who required roads paid the rates. The Government hesitated to subsidize one district in case all the others put in claims. Even I remonstrated when my husband deplored the lack of help.
‘My parents,’ I reminded him, ‘had no road for nearly fifty miles of their journey to town.’
‘That was quite a different thing,’ he pointed out. ‘The stock from a station goes out on the hoof and the wool once a year. Your people had credit. These cockies live from hand to mouth. They were selected on account of their poverty.’
There was one settlement with which my husband, and others, were greatly concerned. Most of the settlers were civil servants, dismissed in the interests of economy in the short depression of 1908 and given grants of land as ample compensation. This was an example of the opinion then generally held that any man who was a trier could make a farmer without previous experience. The qualifications for being given a section in this block were that the applicant should own no land elsewhere, no capital (or almost none), and that he should have a family. To take up unimproved land to-day under such conditions would be considered stark lunacy. But these men were well satisfied and, except for the roading troubles, which no one had expected, might have met with a measure of success. It sounded well that a road to each section had been surveyed and that the making of these was to provide work whereby the farmers might earn cash until the farms became productive.
But the cost of roadmaking had been calculated on pre-war wages. During the war and after it, wages doubled. All farm costs had soared, so that by the time my husband was taking an interest in Tangitu the settlement was in a hopeless plight. Rates could no longer pay for roads.
‘In fact,’ he said, with graphic exaggeration, ‘if you sold the whole settlement, lock, stock and barrel, you couldn't pay for the roading.’
The plight was desperate. All food and farm requisites had to be packed in through a sea of mud and many a packhorse left its bones on the track, drowned in the mud. This transport added £5 a ton to every necessity of life and even at that price men were shy of taking the contract.
I heard of a woman who, shortly after her husband had taken up backblock land, was left a widow with four
The midwives of those rough times have never adequately been recognised. Those of the very early days of the Colony have been written up, but those of the second pioneering stage were, if anything, the braver women. When all the country is wild and civilised conditions twelve thousand miles away, it is a case of needs must but in our district a day's journey would have taken a woman into town where in comfort she could have earned a safer and easier living.
In 1947 I met in Hamilton Mrs Murray who, when I lived in the King Country, had acted as midwife to the whole district. She told of night rides in rain and storm, of
Hats off to these women. I wonder if the conditions of to-day — crowded hospitals, overworked nurses, no privacy, no personal attention — make confinement happier or safer. Mrs Murray, in her eleven years, never lost a mother and, I think she said, only once the baby was born dead. The patient had the benefit of being the sole care of a capable woman. The modern mother may not even hold her baby in her arms as long as she wishes.
* * * *
The beauty of the rocky countryside and the fruitful abundance of the garden went far to reconcile me to the fact, which soon became evident, that we should have to make that undesirable house our home for some little while. Building was as impossible as it is to-day and I was tired of divided homes.
The younger daughter came home from her last year at school delighted with the prospect of living on the farm; the elder daughter came home broken in health as a result of the influenza epidemic, and the son, a pilot in the Air Force, had been demobilised in England where he had to be supported till a passage home was available. He wrote that he would prefer to farm rather than to go on with law, in which he had taken part of his course. As it seemed we should all be together again temporary improvements were necessary. We managed to get some timber (by no means
The fire was caused by the reorganised fireplace.
A few weeks earlier my husband had met with a nasty accident — a pair of shears with which he had been working had been placed open in his saddle-bag so that when he got off his horse they made a great gash up his shin. The local doctor put in nine stitches and assured us that it would be well in no time. But the doctor had not taken dirty shears into account and the wound suppurated badly. He had gone to
‘The chimney's on fire,’ cried the daughter and then, seeing smoke issuing near the ceiling, we both exclaimed, ‘My God! It's the house!’
We shouted for the men; we threw water and did all the usual things but could not get at the fire till the men took an axe and chopped away the mantelpiece and the wall above. Then we succeeded in reducing it and finally putting it out.
But there was a great hole showing the stars where roof and ceiling had been torn away. It freezes hard in the King Country, so when the men had been given a drink and thanked, we must needs go to bed to keep warm. I got up about one o'clock and climbed on the roof. A thaw had set in and a cold mist had come up; I shouted that all was safe, and no spark remained, so we all fell asleep. About three o'clock the elder daughter came into my room, saying, ‘The fire has broken out again in the roof over my room. There's
I had a help, who was also a friend. She behaved like a hero. She forgot her own things, but remembered and saved much of mine and my husband's. Like most people in a fire we didn't save wisely. I imagined that one had to carry the rescued booty at least a chain away, whereas, there being no wind, a few yards would have done. There was not much to save in the way of furniture; but tennis racquets and golf clubs and clothes were a worse loss.
I always remember my poor dear husband when he rode home next morning to face the disaster. We were beginning to realise the extent of the losses.
‘Oh, my watch. If I could have saved that,’ I moaned.
‘Never mind, dear, we'll get you a better one.’
‘My new brushes and….’
‘Don't worry, dear. Be thankful that no one is hurt.’
He insisted that nothing we had lost was irreplaceable, especially as his desk with his books and accounts was saved. But when he found that his old working-clothes had gone up in flames — and no one would have given half-a-crown for the whole outfit — such a wail went up to the heavens. We laughed then and thought his concern a great joke. Later I knew better. A farmer's riding and wet-weather outfit is not only very expensive but very difficult to replace. Also, a man grows attached to the garments he has tested and found adequate.
But the worst of all was that the doctor's report had been bad. Sepsis had infected the whole body and if he did not lie up and seriously rest, his leg would have to come off.
Then we touched bottom. Nothing in life has equalled the following weeks for abject misery, anxiety, discomfort and squalor. The rain that had held off all the winter came down in torrents. We all huddled into the old shed that, by a miracle, had escaped being burnt with the house. The men brought in the goods we had salvaged, every load wetter
A civil servant in Wellington had, some months earlier, asked my husband if he could manage to take his son to work on the farm. He was already doing farm work but the father did not like the company he was in. My husband had consented. We liked the lad; he was strong and well built though, little more than a schoolboy, he was not much use. One day he came to me and with some hesitation and with some emotion told me that he was married and had not found himself able to tell his father. He was in a nasty fix. Finally he came to the point. There was among the many dilapidated buildings around the place an old four-roomed cottage about ten chains away from the house. He had been looking at it and was sure that she could make herself comfortable in the two front rooms, though the back rooms were rotting with dampness. Would I ask
My husband, after extracting a promise that his father should be told, reluctantly consented. A woman arrived who might have been the boy's mother, unattractive, pretentious, cantankerous — everything a woman should not be, and worse, she was obviously pregnant.
The arrangement that she should cook for him in their
So my husband, again reluctantly, had to tell the boy that this was no place to bring a woman in her condition and that he must at once take her out before it became too late for her to ride. They both sulked. It was the day before the fire and though they must have heard the tumult and seen the glow he did not come down to help. The following day he had the excuse of the weather for staying indoors. During a lull we sent for him and explained again that they could not possibly remain in the only whare where there were cooking facilities. We must have it. They dug their toes in and refused to move. At last the rain ceased and the flooded creek subsided, and my husband and I were left alone to breathe and restore our shattered nerves. I wish I could report that I behaved heroically and rose cheerfully to the ugly occasion. I did not even behave well. I kept going and fed them all on the primus, but was tense and ill-tempered. The physical storm I could have stood up to, but the mental stresses were too great.
I am not sure whether the doctors would have called what my husband was suffering from blood-poisoning, but it was a septic condition of his wound that infected the whole body and I do believe that his quick recovery was due to the fact that his working and wet-weather clothes had been burnt. Otherwise I could never have kept him in bed.
The worst stresses pass away in time, and however sordid they are there is some pleasure in looking at them in retrospect. Memory hallows all experience — except that of making a fool of oneself.
Yet even now it was necessary to delay building for a short time. The negotiations for buying Maori land are always slow and tedious and (so the lawyers told us) must not be hurried. As they were alleged to be nearing conclusion we tried to make still another impossible shack temporarily habitable.
I think my long suit lies in making uninhabitable shacks into fairly attractive dwellings. We added a rough verandah and a bathroom. We cut away trees that were growing into the very windows of the back rooms and later built an annex of limestone which, though rough, was a success. From the Assets Board we bought a large Army tent, floored it, built up the sides and thought the invalid daughter should be very comfortable there. But when it rained the water went through the canvas as fast as it came out of the heavens. So we were obliged to buy iron to roof it, which spoiled the comfort by making it dark.
* * * *
There was soon the problem of getting out, for the district was growing quite social. My husband thought I should have an up-to-date riding outfit. The girls had just had habits made in Wellington and not only did I think that they were an outrageous price but they were breeches and leggings under a long coat which so scandalised the best people that I hesitated to give them the shock of seeing a matron in the same rig. Also cars had come to stay and though we had still no road there certainly would shortly be one. I calculated that with horse, saddle, bridle, habit and boots the outfit would cost half as much as a car and I had better wait for a car and a road.
Soon we began to emerge de profundis, built a house, and acquired a model T Ford, though for many years we were without a metalled road.
One day my daughter read out a queer advertisement: ‘Wanted, housework in an educated family where good
‘All the same,’ said the daughter, ‘I should answer it if I were you.’
I wanted help, so I did. In response an interesting foreigner who spoke good English came to see me. He said he had been in New Zealand a long time but his family had just arrived. He was anxious that they should not form a little cell speaking Latvian, but should become good British citizens, so one of his daughters who was a widow had consented to go out working and he wanted to be sure that she should learn correct English. There was further correspondence concerning her little boy of three whom she finally brought with her.
He proved the most entertaining little boy I have known. He spoke his own language very clearly and was interested in learning English. He would come to me with shining morning face, and eyes sparkling, and say, ‘Good morrning, darrling boy! Spik English! Grreen peas! Doan't touch! T'ankyou fery much.’
After a few weeks he began to realise that the words meant something and instead of firing off his whole repertoire of English would point out things and I would give them a name.
One morning I was lacing my riding boots and trying, I thought vainly, to explain to him that when he became a big boy he should ride with me. His eyes sparkled more than the out-worn prospect of being a big boy would seem to warrant. I had ridden as far as the gate when, stopping to open it, I heard a little voice: ‘Don't touch. Stop it’ (the only prohibitive words he knew). ‘Teddy are come.’
His knowledge of English grew apace and his remarks betrayed an interesting angle of thought. When the dogs played, making soft noises as they rolled each other over, Teddy would say, ‘Sago and Jippy spik English.’
He had evidently been told that when it thundered God was angry so, during a thunderstorm, he asked, ‘On whom is the God angry when he make such noise?’
His mother said she did not know.
‘Is it big people or little people?’ he asked.
‘I think big people,’ said the mother, not wishing to frighten him.
‘Yes,’ said Teddy, ‘I think it is that Uncle’ (all the household are uncles and aunts to Latvians) ‘that Uncle what sayd, “Araugh! Jippy. Sit down you dirty swine.”’
As I stood on the verandah one spring morning, amid flowery scents and the tintinnabulation of birds, Teddy came to me saying, ‘Titcheroo. Titcheroo. What mean titcheroo?’
‘Nothing,’ I said, carelessly.
‘Yes,’ he insisted. ‘Language English, what mean titcheroo?’
More decidedly I answered, ‘It means nothing, Teddy. It is not a word.’
‘Then, why that bird say titcheroo and say and say and say?’
He was an excellent mimic, so good that it was easy to detect whether at the moment he was acting a horse, a dog, a cat. As he followed me into the garden, I said, ‘Don't chase pussy.’
‘She rests on your garden,’ he protested.
I explained at some length that cats did not understand that they should not lie on gardens. It was no use trying to teach them.
‘They understand not English?’
‘Yes. That's it.’
A few minutes later he was a rabbit and was loping about and nibbling grass. He loped into a clump of daffodils. I said, ‘Don't, Teddy! You spoil them.’
He cantered away, hiding in flax, but presently ran back into the daffodils. I said, ‘Why did you do that? Look how untidy it is.’
Continuing his game, he said, ‘This rabbit understands not English. You must let he be.’
When my first grandson was born and was to be brought on a visit home, I was almost distressed about my affection for Teddy. What if I should prove an unnatural grandmother and should like the little foreigner better than my own? However, all was well. When I saw the grandson he seemed just the right size and Teddy seemed to have grown a little too big.
Teddy's mother was an educated woman, a teacher in her own country, so she and Teddy learnt English with celerity. Life was very pleasant while she was with me.
Chapter21
The Women's Division
When we had achieved a clay road and a car I began to enjoy driving round the countryside and, rather belatedly, growing to know our neighbours. Soon the Women's Division became my absorbing interest. I was not quick to recognise its merits; I was, in fact, pushed into it.
My husband, always an ardent Farmers' Unionist, had been to Wellington to the annual conference. The wives of delegates often accompanied them, taking a holiday at the hotel. I had sometimes done so but unfortunately not this time (1925). He returned saying, ‘There's something starting in Wellington that is just your price — a women's section of the
I told him, I am afraid coldly, that I didn't care for women's associations. If I sounded ungracious he didn't take it so, for suffragette excesses were not far behind us.
I had been cajoled into attending a few of the suffragette meetings in the Ohau days. They invariably began with, ‘Now that the men have made such an appalling mess of the world we women are going to take a hand to put it to rights.’
That was the spirit of the movement and, though I was in sympathy with its object — the vote — I was narrowminded enough to keep aloof from the fight because I didn't care about the fighters.
Once, in Wellington, I had seen a small procession of women carrying banners, one of which was inscribed (you will hardly believe it) ‘Down with Men’. My husband and brother were the only men I knew much about, and, not being anxious to down either of them, I was naturally lukewarm.
But my husband persisted, ‘You will like this one. They are holding their first gathering in Wanganui and I have promised to take you to it.’
We went, I saw and was conquered. Instead of disgruntled females and acidulated spinsters oozing hatred, I met a band of happy wives and mothers of farmers who were anxious to help their husbands in pushing the old chariot of progress along.
I took a long step forward in development that day and came home all agog to form a branch in
After attending the annual conference I found my interest in the W.D. not merely local. The movement had begun in Wellington when sixteen women gathered at Kirkcaldie's for tea and to listen to
‘Tell us how to obtain help in emergencies such as sickness, or when we have to leave home.’ That was the theme of most of the replies, and from them the ‘Bush Nurse and Housekeeper Scheme’ was evolved. The W.D. began by engaging a housekeeper who was to go to the country on call. But this was a time of rising wages and it was soon found that countrywomen's ideas of money values are far lower than those of the towns. Settlers on the still undeveloped farms felt it impossible to afford the wages common in the town so we engaged two trustworthy women and started a fund wherewith to subsidise their wages to indigent cases or indeed any case where there was difficulty in affording the whole wage — at that time, thirty shillings a week. The scheme, a boon to countrywomen, was well planned and carried out effectively and grew constantly until the second war made it impossible to find housekeepers.
The Division has undoubtedly been a great success; but I deprecate very strongly the vainglorious attitude of a small minority who say, ‘See what women can do.’ We must realise that the wealth we are so proud of came originally from the farms and could not have been accumulated but for the generosity of the farmers who have indeed been extremely liberal. Our system is that membership costs only half-a-crown and branches, once they have been in existence long enough to find their feet, are asked to send an annual donation to a fund which we call ‘the Community Chest’. These donations are raised by garden-parties, ‘bring and buy’ stalls and other activities and are used to subsidise the wage of the housekeepers sent to indigent cases. Thus the fund becomes, not a source of charity, but a kind of insurance. Members, while things go well with them, help
Members have sometimes told me that their husbands made things difficult for them, jeering at their attachment to the Division and to their branch. ‘Oh, yes! I know; the Division first, husband nowhere’. But these must have been few, for the men have been known to hold stock-drives for the benefit of the organisation. These were supported with great generosity. My man, I remember, was readier to give than I, and was always suggesting new localities in which a branch might be formed.
It was the housekeeper scheme that did most towards making the men co-operate. They realist what a relief it would be to them should household upheavals occur in busy periods.
Chapter13
The Slump
Of those years in the King Country, by far the most important event, either public or private, was the depression of the 'thirties.
Of course there had been reports of falling prices but that is chronic in a farming community. My notice was first brought to its gravity when, driving home one sale-day, I overtook a neighbour taking home a mob of sheep. The road was narrow and downhill and I was almost at the corner where I was to turn off. So as not to hustle the mob I shut off the engine and let the car roll slowly beside the man. He rode up to the car window and shouted explosively, ‘Run over them! What's the good of them? The useless mongrels, the perishing, unprincipled bimbos, the rotten, spindle-legged, god-forsaken …’ and other adjectives less often used in polite society.
I laughed, as I was meant to, and soon he explained the cause of the unusual outburst.
‘The sale was dead — dead as mutton. Not a bid. Aren't they a decent line of ewes? What's wrong with them? There wasn't a mouth opened for them.’
Henceforth never a word seemed to be spoken among farmers except about the staggering fall in the value of stock — sheep first and later cattle. We learned that the fall was not merely local: it was Dominion-wide. It was world-wide, and so sudden. Of course, there had been signs and portents and some prophets of evil, but price fluctuations are an integral part of the producers' game. Hope springs eternal and most of them thought it would be all over in no time. It was generally thought that we had
From day to day the depression deepened. The farmers could hardly believe the prices they read in the papers. They talked of nothing else and it seemed to me that no man ever let another finish his sentence. Conversation was something like this:
‘It won't be over till we reduce….’
‘It all comes from America and the New York Times says….’
‘Dr Mcllraith gives this slump the same course as it took in the 'eighties.’
‘It was 1896….’
‘Oh, longer than that….’
‘It's no use pretending! No one knows any more than we do….’
The men spoke objectively as discussing an event. No one voiced his own fear that lay cold upon the hearts of most of them.
It was otherwise with the women. To them the tragedy was the frustration, the postponement of long-deferred desires, of hopes dashed in the dust. To put off once more additions to the house, so desperately needed, or the car, so nearly delivered that it seemed an accomplished fact, or the new electric stove, or the furnishing of the sitting-room. And, bitterest of all, there was no college or boarding-school for the bright son or the promising daughter. That had been postponed too long already and ‘youth's a stuff will not endure’ or wait till depressions pass by.
It was sometimes easy to detect signs of resentment against husbands who had refused amenities in favour of ploughing a new paddock or buying more stock. Now these things had been proved useless women felt they had pinched and denied themselves for nothing.
I own that I said to my husband, ‘Why didn't we snatch our trip Home? We couldn't have less than nothing.’
To him it was dishonest to think in that way.
Soon we began to hear of bankruptcies among the big landowners of the old-established districts. Colossal figures (they seemed to us) that these men failed for. We knew that the whole civilised world was involved but it did not console us much. There was the less hope of our own quick recovery.
Then, but not till 1933, the Government raised the exchange rate of our pound. It undoubtedly was a measure of relief for the farmer but it was hard to understand. Men shouted scraps of undigested articles from the daily papers. Most of them were hostile to the innovation and the visible effect was to make
The farmers had been facing ruin for well nigh a year before the workers of the towns and cities felt the full force of the blizzard. We country people had thought of it as our slump, our special ruin. Now we realised the indivisibility of calamity and that there were those still more naked to the blast than we. At least we could eat; the unemployed were hungry. It was brought home to us as we read such advertisements as: ‘Wanted, any work, anywhere, any wage’.
‘My God! That's a desperate cry,’ said the farmer, and was not slow to send generous supplies of food to the depots which were being established in the towns.
It was ungratefully, if truthfully, said that the sheep and cattle slaughtered for this purpose were so shrunken in value as not to amount to a very munificent contribution. That was so, but they were given in the hour of the farmer's own desperate need and the gifts would jeopardise his chances of recovery in case of a rise in prices.
In spite of the constant declaration of the Prime Minister,
When relief was finally given it was to those only who had no resources whatever. Men hastily withdrew their small savings from the banks and either spent them or kept them in their pockets before applying for ‘sustainance’. A hundred-pound note was found on the floor of a business in
Then the cry went up that the youth of the Dominion, the men of the future, were being irretrievably ruined by enforced idleness. The boys, it was urged, had done well at school or college, had prepared for a career, only to find every door closed to them. Truly, there was nothing for them to do. Even the meanest and worst-paid jobs were eagerly snapped up by fathers of families. The women's societies added their powerful voices to this cry. One woman told her branch of the Division that she had employed her boys in planting cabbages during the day and had gone herself at night and deliberately pulled them up.
During the long depression of the 'eighties commodities and services had gradually come down to something like the level of export prices. But the trade unions would not admit of this painful process. Whatever happened they insisted that their wages were not to be cut.
Things were bad indeed. One of the early moves of the Government was to impose 3d. in the £ on all who had retained their jobs for the relief of those who had lost theirs. It is strange to remember that this trifling tax was regarded as an atrocious imposition and it was freely asserted that no Government would be able to enforce it. We have travelled far since then. There is no doubt that those who were not losers by the depression were distinct gainers. Businesses, houses, farms fell to those who could pay for them at slump prices and even in a small way the woman with cash in her purse could pick up many bargains. It seemed only fair that the fortunate ones should be taxed for the benefit of those who, by sheer ill luck, had lost their means of livelihood. When whole firms became bankrupt and closed down it was the best as well as the worst of their employees who suffered.
I have heard it cleverly argued that if the social system had not been tampered with by moratoriums, exchanges, interest reductions and debt cancellations and other infringements of the rules of the game, the social order would have righted itself in the end with more fairness and justice and would have continued to work smoothly. I am not sure. It is true that sudden interference with the laws to meet emergencies always results in injustice, but hunger and cold are ‘not hereafter’. They must be dealt with in the present.
* * * *
As far as fear of losing our own farm lay, we were not, when the slump hit us, in a very vulnerable position. Most of the mortgage was in the Advances to Settlers Office and it soon became evident that if the Government were to keep farmers on their land it would be obliged to find ninety per cent. of its interest. Though tolerably safe, our hopes were
‘If only the slump had waited till the land had been broken in we could have laughed at it,’ said my husband.
The real trouble in our prospects was that all unawares we had grown old — far too old to consider making a new start. My husband realised it, though, because our natural force was not abated, I did not. He was approaching the allotted span and I but seven years younger.
About that time, May 1932, if I remember aright, I received a telephone call from Wellington, telling me that it was proposed to send a commission of three women to enquire and to report upon female unemployment in the Dominion, and inviting me to be one of the women to undertake the work. A daughter, temporarily with us, was willing to run the home and my husband was, as usual, delighted that I should do such congenial work, so there was no bar to my accepting.
The commission was to visit all main centres and was authorised to give a certain amount of relief.
‘Your task,’ said Name afterwards changed to ‘Employment’.
The details of our work had been well planned. We made contact everywhere with the existing women's organisations. They helped splendidly and, as always, gratis. If the commission accomplished nothing spectacular it was certainly a highly necessary gesture. There is a type of public woman
It was a great satisfaction to me to be able to state authoritatively and in detail exactly what had been done for women. As a matter of fact there was never a time in New Zealand when a decent woman need be without food and shelter and, as a rule, some sort of wage. In crises men come into their own as the protectors of women and there was always room for girls in domestic service. We look back and say that maids were ill paid and worse treated, but in saying so we are looking too far back. Already the attitude towards maids was changing and housewives were growing more reasonable.
We began work in the south and found that — especially in Dunedin — extensive charity had already been organised. But the ever-increasing applicants for relief made the problem too large for private handling. The scheme we were given to work upon was as follows. A town or city requiring Government help to cope with women's unemployment must elect a committee of reputable citizens, men and women. They must find a suitable building which should be converted temporarily into a domestic training school. Girls, unable to take housework because they had worked in shops and factories, were to receive an intensive training in housecraft. They were to be paid a sustenance wage of ten shillings a week, with three meals a day, provided at the kitchens and cooked by themselves under supervision. The course was to last six weeks after which time they were supposed to take any form of employment that could be found for them.
The scheme was excellent — the local committees did their work well. The training kitchens were efficient, the girls came readily to take their ten shillings and gratis meals; but when they were asked to take domestic service, or indeed any service that took them from the part of the town with which they were familiar, they often refused point-blank.
‘What, me stuck over at St. Clair and me boy in Mornington? Not likely!’
And as for the country where they were needed, few indeed consented to go. That was indeed the last thing. Those who benefited from the scheme — and for whom it was probably worth while — were elderly, respectable, unattached women. For the most part these were not very strong and anything but efficient. They would now be on Social Security.
At the Auckland Training Centre I spoke to one of these who looked more capable than usual, about coming to me to work on the farm. She owned she was a married woman whose husband was out of work, and so not eligible for training. She said he was older than she and not fit for heavy work but could garden. She was not willing to be parted from him so I took them both as a married couple.
It was amusing, and not a little pathetic, to watch their shrinking gaze as the car left their populous and familiar haunts behind, and how the farmlands we thought so rich and beautiful were to them a barren horror. Our own farm is studded with outcrops of limestone rock which to us look like old ruined castles and add immensely to the picturesqueness of the landscape. They could not bear to look at these rocks — so bleak, they thought them. She proved an excellent woman in the house and he'was amiable, if not very useful in the garden; but the day — the very day — the stipulated six weeks expired they packed up and returned to Auckland. Probably she took another course in housewifery, which she did not need, with its accompanying
Most towns welcomed the commission and were anxious for every form of relief that we were authorised to offer. Usually they found it little enough. The only exception was the
As a sideline we visited, as a commission, the newly set up Youth Camps. These were a collection of well-pitched tents, wooden floored and boarded three feet up the sides. There was a fireplace in each and two comfortable bunks. There was also a large cookhouse or common-room where a man cook officiated. Firewood was provided and the boys received ten shillings a week pocket-money.
My city-bred colleagues were shocked at the amount of mud surrounding the camps and sent reports to the effect that loads of shingle were needed. I was less impressed.
Strange to say, these Youth Camps were, in the eyes of Labour, the Government's chief condemnation. Even to-day in political meetings one hears an interjecting voice shout, ‘Ten bob a week? That's your idea of a wage.’ Yet, compared with the small farmers whose land surrounded the camps, these boys were in the lap of luxury. The farmers received no ten bob a week. They never saw money. Every penny earned was already mortgaged to the dairy factory which allowed them the necessities of life — flour, tea, sugar, salt, soap. I won't say etceteras, for these were few indeed. Butcher's meat was to some unknown, unless the dairyman happened to run a few sheep. The boys of the camp, trooping back from their day's work to a good dinner at five o'clock, were keenly envied by these farmers. They (the
Some threw in the sponge: some hung on, submitting to an even lower standard of living. No wonder their hearts were filled with envy, malice and all uncharitableness at the sight of what they considered the pampered youth of the cities strolling home at five o'clock to a well-cooked dinner eaten to the sounds of jazz music, after a day's work that the farmer laughed at as child's play.
If all those optimistic settlers could, by any means, have
The hardest cases of all were to be found among farmers in quite a sound position, so sound that though the money market had grown shy of land risks, they were still able to borrow further capital. These recognised that, at slump prices, the amount of stock they were carrying would not make profits. They therefore increased their indebtedness to break in more land. Fat stock for the local market was still almost holding its own, so they borrowed, to drain, clear or plough, put in turnips, buy stores, or whatever operation appeared at the time most hopeful. The crops were good, the stock fattened, but, alas, the market was glutted. The prices they were obliged to take spelt ruin, for fat stock can be kept no more easily than strawberries and the overseas market had gone.
Nor were dishonest agents, valuators, inspectors wanting to accentuate disaster. If, by reporting a man's case as hopeless, you drove him off his farm there would surely be pickings for the valuer. How was the farmer to know if his good two-tooths were replaced by culls at the sale, his own having changed hands beforehand at a private little deal between friends? Or, in a smaller way, his good brood mare might be replaced by a crock with three legs and a swinger, or a foal might lose itself before getting into the yards. True, the farmer might examine the accounts or even be present at the sale, but he seldom did. He was ruined already and his mind was on the new nook where fate or his efforts would toss him next. These men went out permanently embittered and the focus of their hatred was
I remember my husband saying in this connection that the American practice of turning out the civil servants of the
If the Farmers' Union, following the example of the trade and labour unions, had made it its business to investigate the case of every settler threatened with eviction and had set up a committee to fight the cause of those in a sound position, the union would have justified its existence for all time. Of what use is a union that cannot protect its members from victimization?
Another activity that was crying to be undertaken was work for the swaggers on the road, or such of them as genuinely wanted it. The roads were literally streaming with them. It was customary to jibe at this form of seeking employment but we sometimes forget that there was no alternative method established. They came in such numbers that they knew themselves the uselessness of asking for food from the cottages within a short distance of the road.
Happening to be in the
The absurdity was that these swaggers were daily passing the work they were looking for. There were still many farmers who wanted draining, scrub-cutting, ploughing. What, would have been simpler than to have had lists of
The Government eventually set up labour bureaux but only in the centres. If the Farmers' Union had set up small ones all over New Zealand it would have cleared the roads of all but the professional tramps who, indeed, were numerous enough.
Once, but this was later, when the Government had brought in the employment levy on all workers for the benefit of those who had no work, I picked up a lone swagger when driving from Hamilton. It was flouting all advice and instructions. It was supposed to be a most foolhardy thing to do. There had been cases where the stupid driver got knocked on the head and the car stolen for his pains. This, however, was a harmless-looking, slab-sided lout with a very small swag and his boots in the very last stages of disrepair. Enquiring about his destination and prospects, I found he had neither. He said that he could never take a job any more because he would have to show his work-book and show that he had paid his levies. He had no book and had paid nothing so he must just keep on walking and getting a meal for charity or in return for a bit of wood-chopping and then tramp on. He assured me that there were plenty of others on the road in the same plight. What strange results well-meant regulations can cause!
There was one other occasion when I disregarded advice and picked up a man on the road. It was night and the man ran up to the car and asked for a lift. His face in the light compelled me. It was young and drawn. He told me that he had heard of a billet in a bakery in
The towns were never as badly hit by the slump as the country. As an instance, the son of a well-known public man took his share of the patrimony and at the peak of the boom invested it in unimproved hill country not far from
Chapter14
Gordon Coates
It was the work of the Women's Unemployment Commission that brought me in touch with
He had nothing to do with my appointment to the Commission. He evidently was in the habit of delegating patronage to his subordinates for, when we were summoned to meet him as Minister of Employment, he was surprised to see me there. But, somehow, whether because he had known my husband, or because, in my effort to understand what had happened to the world, I was at the time taking a violent interest in finance, he spared more time to talk to me than my complete unimportance warranted.
He was not a good politician. He went straight to the business in hand and had forgotten — if he ever knew — how to receive electors with affable palaver; but if ever a man was wholeheartedly sincere and was striving with every strained nerve to restore order and equilibrium to this little corner of the collapsing world, that man was
In the early stages of the slump my husband and I knew just as much as the ordinary man about the genesis of money — that is to say, we knew nothing at all. It had been demonstrated to me in my childhood that gold was divine wealth because God always saw to it that just enough was
Economic Consequences of the Peace fell into my hands and soon afterwards Truth about the Slump. I was transported with enthusiasm. It was so new and, to my mind, so clear a light that I wanted to shout the thing aloud to everybody.
The Government (
Then suddenly, these products being no longer in demand, the plenty became a liability. Oh yes! We know now what should have been done. It did not look so simple then. Did any politician put a single helpful suggestion on record?
It is true that even before the depression there were many people who could not afford to buy the luxuries. I was one of them. All the same, it was stimulating to know they were there.
Encouraged by
It was not till 1933, when
It is true that, as the election approached, the Conservative papers piped down and told their readers that, after all, they had better vote for the Government, but the seed had been sown and had sprouted.
Yet it was by no means a new experiment, nor in any way peculiar to New Zealand. Every civilised country
Mr Coates himself was a poor exponent of his own policy. I doubt if he ever tried very hard to induce the public to understand and follow his actions. He was too busy. I asked him once why he did not take the country into his confidence concerning the motives and expected results of his regulations. He said that he had no organ for such matter, that no paper was willing to publish his explanations. I was not convinced; nor am I yet.
In 1933 I represented the Women's Division at the opening of the Farmers' Union Conference where
Never was a public man more violently traduced and more grossly slandered than
‘If old G.C. didn't tip his brother the wink not to sell good assets for currency about to be devalued,’ laughed Mr Bennett, ‘it is hardly likely that he took much trouble to enrich his friends — especially as he and his brother are partners.’
Mr Coates could not be said to have suffered from a whispering campaign — his traducers shouted their accusations from the housetops. One story that flew from mouth to mouth and was widely credited was that he had told an assembly of hungry unemployed that they might eat grass. No one could ever be found who had heard him say it nor could it be suggested on what occasion it was said. Perhaps the case of the unfortunate Foulon, Mayor of Paris, was in the mind of the inventor. It was easily repeated and, by
Mr Coates's electorate contracted a particularly severe attack of the Douglas Credit epidemic. The women of the meeting I held at Ruawai, when on Division business, were obviously intending to vote against him, but all the same they held him in high respect.
One woman made a disparaging remark and was immediately challenged. ‘Na, na,’ said an emphatic Scottish voice. ‘Gordon wouldna do the like o' that. The Coates are a verra religious family.’
When the second war came
Mr Coates's manner, however, offended many people. A deputation of very important gentlemen — all, as they were careful to explain, his ardent supporters — waited on him with the usual very important request. When he had heard them he stood up and without a word went and looked out of the window. Accustomed to properly-behaved politicians who obsequiously assured deputations that the matter was near their hearts and should receive every consideration, the potentates were outraged. They declared that the Minister
He did the same thing — perhaps with more circumspection — to a deputation sent from the Conference of the Women's Division. I will own that we were considerably surprised and looked at each other with lifted brows, but when he returned from the window we realised that he had been pondering our petition, had grasped its significance and would probably grant it on the spot.
Assuredly, if
Chapter15
The Down Grade
Do we all say in our hearts, ‘It can't happen here’? Do we feel that the thing we dread must not, shall not, come to us? We see clearly that disaster is all but universal, but even when the clouds are gathering we persuade ourselves that they will disperse. Certainly I could never have expected calamity from the quarter whence it came. My husband's health broke down. He, who had seemed a safe and permanent bulwark for so many to lean upon, became seriously ill. An operation — an astonishing recovery, giving renewed hope — a second operation revealing that the first had been bungled. Then ill health till the sudden end. I must pass over these times.
My son abandoned law and came home to manage the farm. The following year a daughter with her family coming to live with me enabled me to accept the presidency of the Women's Division. These years of office, with their absorbing duties, coming at a time when everything at home was the same, yet not the same, helped me as nothing else could have done. I found it fitting, too, that the organisation my husband had been interested in and for which he had done so much, should now be his widow's comfort.
It is one of my deepest regrets that the honours that were about this time bestowed upon me — the Coronation Medal and the O.B.E.— came to me after the death of my husband. They would have given him such pride and pleasure. Being appointed a J.P., I found myself of considerable use as long as I lived near
The Women's Division, while I was able to serve it, remained an absorbing interest — my first and only love in public life. I often wondered — I do still — that the Women's Division, consisting so largely of women deeply religious in the orthodox sense, should have been tolerant enough to make me its president. True, I have never flaunted my heterodoxy, but on the other hand I made no pretence nor have I been at pains to conceal what might have shocked many dear friends had they enquired into the tenets of my faith. But this age does not enquire, which surprised me, for I was ever a proselytizer who, if I see a light, or think I do, must proclaim it, and can well understand those who make nuisances of themselves in trying to spread their gospels.
I was never able to accept a statement without challenge or reservation. At a very early age I asked, ‘What makes you know that the Bible is true? It can't have been written by God because it is written about Him. Who wrote it?’
‘Good men whom God chose to be His messengers to men. The Commandments were written on stone by the finger of God’, I was told.
This was convincing. My fingers could not write on stone. Later, when I heard of engraving and sculpture, new doubts crept into my mind.
My mother was wise in what she told me. ‘The people of the world had grown wicked and cruel, just as bad as those who had lived before the Flood. But, instead of drowning the world a second time, God “repented Him” and sent them the Bible which is His law, to teach men the wisdom of honesty, justice, kindness.’ My mind has always worked slowly. I thought a great deal about it, but was never entirely satisfied. Then I evolved for myself an explanation of the universe, and was convinced that the animals were really people undergoing some dreadful punishment under a spell or curse. Of course, all creation meant to me the animals and birds I knew and saw about
Perhaps a lonely childhood in the country is conducive to bizarre thinking for, when in Timaru, I became a regular church-goer and a devout Anglican. I enjoyed learning the Catechism, taking pleasure in its balanced cadences.
Not till my twentieth year did The Origin of Species fall into my hands. Then I read, not the nonsense attributed to
I hugged my Origin of Species all to myself and, as I read, the whole outlook of creation completely changed. The earth and the waters had revealed their secrets, or had, at least, given me the key by which I might discover them. It was as if I walked with the Creator and saw him at work. I saw — no new vision, but new to me — all Me as one — Man, insect, mammal, bird, and plant as one universal manifestation of seething, endless life; and death as but a flicker before transformation into new life. The moth that fluttered into my candle revealed the myriads of years and the unthinkable myriads of lives that were needed to develop those wings, the immense vista of time that it had taken to evolve that comparatively clumsy insect. It was as though, blind, I had been shown light; asleep, I had been awakened from dreams to truth. For a while I was completely satisfied and sure that if old Omar could have met Darwin there would have been no veil through which he could not see, no door to which he found no key. Yet, illogically enough, I thrilled to the beauty of Christianity and to other mystic beauties in no way connected with the survival of the fittest by the wholesale destruction of the unfit. Was evolution the whole truth or were there other factors that went to make up the universe? When, out of the limitless number of living species, one, and one only, struggled up and up finally becoming man, might not a new force have come into the world with him — the breath of
That a spirit of good has somehow entered the cosmos seems to me clear but that there is a spirit of evil I personally doubt. Evil seems to me merely the negation of good. Is not crime, even wanton cruelty, atavistic, a reversion to the animal nature we have left behind? The predatory instinct, so strong in us all, is it not simply a desire to seize for ourselves a fuller share of the good things of life regardless of who may lack them? And all cruelty, from foxhunting to Belsen, may be a morbid desire to banish one's own inferiority complex by the exercise of power over others, unchecked by the spirit of good.
And how visualise or conceive of this spirit? To me it is as light might be to a man born blind, unseen, unheard, unfelt but all-pervading; a power in us and around us but vivifying. We may welcome it, drink deep draughts of it, inhale it, take it as our own, or we may turn away and reject it. It still remains.
Akhnaton, the mystic Pharaoh of Egypt, taught his followers to worship a living God (not made with hands), a God of infinite love, goodness and mercy. The sun was the symbol of the Godhead but that which he worshipped was the ‘power which dwells behind the sun, the power that generates, sustains and nurtures every living thing upon the earth’. In our words ‘the Creator and Giver of life by whom
Man has lived for some three thousand years since the time of Akhnaton and has had some hundred thousand philosophers, thinkers, spiritual guides and teachers; yet it would be hard to find a purer, more exalted conception of God than that given by this boy Pharaoh. We too assert and would believe that God is a spirit, but too often we ascribe to Him attributes and motives befitting a man and befitting even a childish and vengeful man.
Between this essence, this Holy Spirit, and the God of the Israelites I see no connection whatsoever. Jehovah was obviously a man, though possessed of superhuman powers. He walked and talked as a man; His nostrils were pleased by the smell of burnt offerings; He laughed in derision, was jealous and partial; He made mistakes and ‘repented Him’ of them. Also, as is seldom stressed, He had, not one, but many sons. (See Gen. vi. 2.) ‘The sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose’.
Nor, in spite of the inspiring decorations that art and poetry and literature have woven round Christianity, can I bring myself to accept the doctrine of original sin and the need for a blood sacrifice to atone for it. A god who begets a son and sacrifices him in order to appease his own wrath against his own creatures appears to me incomprehensible. Miraculous births, gods descending to earth in order to become the fathers of great men have been among the imaginings of men throughout the ages. It was natural in those superstitious times that when the new religion swept through Europe and the Nile Valley some parts of the old beliefs of the people should have become incorporated with the new enlightened teaching. As far as we know the great teacher made no such claims for himself. And surely
Still, though the Story of the Cross may be man-made, may even have derived from the ancient priestly cry for blood on their altars, it can be presented so as to stir by its beauty our deepest emotions. In worshipping Christ crucified, even as a symbol, we are worshipping what is best and greatest. We exalt supreme love in the form of self-renunciation (‘for greater love hath no man than this’), even if it be a symbol.
I am anxious that no one should suppose that I attach these personal opinions of mine in the belief that they are something worth offering to the public. Indeed, I am fully aware that ideas of the sort have been put forward and supported by weighty arguments by men of intellect and authority; but, for one reason or another, the ‘general average’ does not always read their books. Memoirs, on the other hand, are read by friends, acquaintances and contemporaries of equal intelligence with the writer. I feel sure that some among these have wrestled, or are wrestling, with problems like mine — how to reconcile what one would wish to believe with what one can believe. Perhaps some of these will be interested to know how one of their kind has worked it out for herself.
Old age has been a considerable surprise to me. I had supposed that when the eye darkened, the ear dulled, and the natural force abated, there would come a misty, dreamy time, a sort of Land of Beulah standing between life and the grave; a tranquil and serene time when feeling would be blunted, emotion and ardour grown faint, when memories would give pleasure mingled, perhaps, with a mild pang of regret; a time when love and hate would merge into tolerance; a time of resignation to all that was and is and is to be.
I find it far otherwise. We remain acutely alive.
I remember meeting, in her declining years, a woman I had known and admired in the prime of her life. She had been a ‘great lady’, cultured, dominant, charitable, capable, an influence always for good. She was now too blind to read and too deaf to enter into conversation. How my heart went out to her as she sat with folded hands and tranquil pose. It hurt so to think of her that I told myself that she was probably as happy as she had ever been, that acute yearnings and disappointments no longer troubled her, that she surely had pleasant and gratifying memories to soothe the lonely hours. I recalled Kipling's lines on old age:
‘The lamp of our life shall go utterly out And we shall exist on the smell of it And whatever we do we shall fold our hands And suck our gums and think well of it.’
How wrong I was! How wrong Kipling was! I know now that beneath that calm exterior the old lady may have been seething and burning with desire to live, to be of the world again and to count for something in it. The flesh had betrayed her in the matter of sight and hearing, but probably she knew that she herself had increased in capacity, ability, self-confidence; that added maturity had brought her balance and more poise than ever. If only she could be up and doing, how much she could achieve. As to the joys of memory, I know now that memory is a two-edged sword. Complacency is the blunter edge, while regret, the sharper, turns on us unbidden to stab and pierce and lacerate till its victim groans aloud. In youth regrets can be brushed aside for there is still time to retrieve some part of the consequences of error. In old age it is never-forever, never-forever.
Sir
True, but even he could give no formula for avoiding those added blunders.
* * * *
Following the example of Montaigne, I proclaim, ‘Lo, here a well-meaning book.’ This is true, inasmuch as in undertaking it I meant to employ my old age — wherein I was denied the pleasure of reading — agreeably and profitably. I had not gone far before I realised that for all the profit likely to accrue to me I had better have taken to the wash-tub. Nevertheless, I continued and in due course have come to the end of the book, the writing of which has given me some entertainment and even pleasure. May I hope that a portion of the same has fallen to you.
SirHubert Ostler 's Reply to Farewell Speeches from Members of the Wellington Bar and Representatives of the New Zealand Law Society.
Reprinted from New Zealand Law Journal, 2 March, 1943.
‘Gentlemen, I have known for some time that I possessed your respect and confidence; that you knew that, whatever my faults, I was trying to hold the scales of justice evenly, but it makes me proud and yet humble to realize that, to some extent, I have also won your affection.
‘If I had not for some time lost the gentle art, I should have blushed at hearing the high praise lavished on me by your two speakers. I can only attribute it to the fact that, as old friends, they are unconsciously biased in my favour. I wish I could think that my work as a Judge deserved half the praise which they have bestowed on it to-day. I have tried my best to carry the Torch of Justice which was handed to me by my distinguished predecessors, so that I could pass it on to my successor, whoever he might be, undiminished in brightness. But then I was set an impossible task.
‘My predecessors were such giants that, as compared with them, I have always felt I was amongst the pygmies. Looking back, of all the qualifications that a good Judge should possess, I can honestly say that I had only three, and for two of those I can claim no credit. I certainly had a good digestion and a sound set of nerves, but for those qualities I am indebted to my heredity. The only qualification for which I can claim any credit myself is the habit of work which I had acquired by the time I came to the Bench.
‘I acquired the habit of work in this way. As some of you know, for the first eight years of my life, after I left school,
‘I thought then that those eight years had been absolutely wasted, that they were years that the locusts had eaten; but I came to think quite differently later, and I firmly believe that the years I spent knocking round bush camps, saleyards, and shearing-sheds were a better preparation for the practice of the law than anything I ever learned out of a book. Moreover those eight years of work gave me a strong constitution and great physical strength, except for one piece of bad luck which was the real cause of my subsequent premature breakdown in health.
‘When I was twenty-two years of age I had a riding accident. I was violently thrown against a stump and iniured my spine; in fact, one of the doctors who saw the X-ray photographs which were taken later, declared that I had actually broken my neck. I think that opinion, however, was somewhat exaggerated. At any rate, I seemed to recover completely from the accident, except that I always had a
‘The profession of the law seems to have fallen on evil days as compared with the time when I first entered it, and its future is dark and uncertain. Nevertheless, knowing all that, if I had the chance to start again, I would unhesitatingly choose the law. It is quite true that our profession has produced a few rogues. No profession is exempt from that disadvantage. But it is sound at the core and is composed almost entirely of men of sterling honesty who are trusted by the public and who are doing work for the community which is indispensable. There is a spirit of camaraderie and good fellowship about the profession which is unique, and that is especially noticeable at the Wellington Bar. Moreover, in the law a man can keep his independence of mind, and he has no necessity to truckle or to be servile to anyone. Yet, oddly enough, I drifted into the law by a pure accident and started training for my career without the least enthusiasm. It happened in this way.
‘In April, 1900, most of my friends in the country went off to the Boer War in the Fourth Contingent. I was madly keen to go too, but being an only son of a widowed mother I felt it my duty to stay. So I stayed behind, very restless and dissatisfied; but just then things began to move in the farming world. The dairy industry was just started, and
‘My plan was, if I was too late for the war, to sit on the doorstep of
‘Throughout my whole career in the law I have been favoured with wonderful good luck. I had a bit of a struggle for the first two and a half years, but that in itself was good discipline. My first trouble was that I could not get a job in any legal office. I tried them all from top to bottom, and none of them could see any merit in me. I daresay there was a fair amount of hayseed in my hair, and my appearance must certainly have been bucolic. By persistence I managed to “wangle” a personal interview with both
‘At the end of the first year I was penniless. The only way I knew of earning money was by manual work, so I slipped off to the country and got a job cutting down timber-trees and sawing them into lengths for transport to a sawmill. I stayed at that job for four and a half months, and by working long hours I was able to make high wages for those times; and two days before the University started again, I returned to Wellington with £60 in my pocket. Then I thought if I could only get a job in a legal office I could get through the following year. It was my friend,
‘I also had the very good fortune to be closely associated with four giants of the law. I had four years with Law Reports with the right to practise as a barrister, which, of course, I never dreamed would be of any value, as no one would be likely to employ an unknown junior. But just as I commenced the new work the first King's Counsel were appointed in New Zealand, and in a short time I was working day and night devilling and doing junior counsel work for Mr Bell and
‘As you know, I have had eighteen years on the Bench, and in spite of the fact that for fifteen years of that time I have had increasing ill health and pain, I have really enjoyed every minute of my work on the Bench. What has made it so pleasant has been my relations with members of the Bar. I have never had anything but kindness and consideration from them, and have never had such a thing as a “breeze” in Court, and I have been helped by nearly every counsel who appeared before me.
‘Gentlemen, I feel sad to leave it all prematurely, but I do not wish to be lugubrious in any way about the parting.