With Ample Rainfall

A recent book, Crest to Crest, an anthology of Canterbury prose and poetry, has two pieces of my writing. The first is Uncle Charlie which was one of the first pieces I put on this blog. Here is the other - slightly longer in that the published piece was edited for reasons of space.

'With ample rainfall, the Banks Peninsula hillside soils a combination of wind-blown loess and weathered volcanic rock were fertile from the ash of the burnt bush and the rotting stumps as well as sheep and cattle dung. The river flats were formed from flood silt. Small one-unit farms, very dependent upon the wife's labour both in the household and on the farm, were indeed the norm, a conscious political decision of the Liberal Government of the 1890s. As the children grew their labour was put to use. Sheep and beef cattle grazed the hills, dairy cows the flats and lower heights; most farms a mixture of both. Mainly Romney Cross, the sheep provided fat lambs for the English market, with wool as a supplementary source of income. The beef cattle were either Hereford or Black Poll. The sheep and cattle farmers worked to nature's rhythms, tailing, dehorning, (both bloody and noisy events) shearing, drafting, bursts of hectic activity interspersed with maintenance tasks.

Dairy folk faced a harder life; tied to the cow-bails for nine months of the year. A continual source of disagreement amongst cockies was whether Friesian or Jersey were the best breed for milking, while the few herds of Shorthorn had their own devotees. Most of the milk went to the co-operative cheese factory, though a few farmers separated and sent the cream churns through to Christchurch by train. At the factory they met and yarned each morning as they delivered milk by truck or cart and loaded whey for their pigs. Unless they were working at the vats, (suppliers were rostered as part of the cheese co-op), they could take the day off to go over to Akaroa Harbour to put out the flounder net, join a working bee at the Church or school, replace fences or repair yards.

John, my father, farmed in Pigeon Bay. Shortly after World War 2 started and I turned five, he failed to arrive home on time for the hot midday meal. His back was broken in the fall from his horse. He lingered for a few days before dying. Except for Mum's distress, I remember little of the blurred events after that. Ever since then a woman's tears reduce me to helplessness. She and her two sons shifted back to live with Pop (her father) at Little River. Uncle Tom's old whey-eaten truck laden with our furniture stalled near the top of the Pigeon Bay Rd. Pop’s Oldsmobile was right behind. A rope was attached. Mum, Doug and I were left on the snow-covered bank watched by curious heifers as the rope took the strain. After towing the truck to the Summit Road. Pop came back to collect us. The writing of this memoir has proved a rescue operation - events long forgotten suddenly resurrecting vividly back into the mind. The day of John’s accident remains clear, but the day of his funeral is completely cauterised. Obviously there was little discussion about it. Granny Lee told me years later that Dick, who became my stepfather, came home from the service talking about the two poor fatherless boys but whether that was her myth or truth, I do not know. The event must have been traumatic to an imaginative child, an unexpected ambush of grief and loss. It welded a strong sense of insecurity on to me - an obvious grounding for a life in education, an occupation that attempts to bring some order out of the chaos.

If at school I learnt the 'three r's'; back on the farm I learnt other facts of life. One was the simple fact of killing animals for meat. All three men in my life killed the fortnightly mutton, as well as old sheep for dog tucker. They cracked the neck as they cut the beast's throat. Pop alerted me to the pig's shrill dying scream when a knife was was struck through its heart. Mum beheaded chook, duck and goose with one quick decisive axe blow - a clean execution. She refused to let the beheaded birds flap round headless as several neighbours did. Men skinned the sheep and scalded the pig, women plucked the poultry - constants of life.

All three men managed large vegetable gardens. I helped, probably hindered, them as they planted and hoed. Each milked a house-cow. Although Pop had two separate cow-bails he often used to carry the three-legged stool out into the paddock. As soon as the small Jersey heard his call, udder swinging, she’d run to him. He would feed her hay, and sitting on the stool milk her. Every now and then he would squirt some milk straight from the teat into my or a dog's mouth. The pet Canadian goose, wings clipped to prevent it flying, waddling up to survey the scene once got the jet of milk aimed for me. Great hilarity. Thereafter the stupid bird expected this as one of the milking rituals.

It was not all idyllic - I also recollect Pop coming in from milking with his sou-wester and oilskin dripping wet and warming his hands before Mum's stove. He'd leave two large billies for us and go on over the road to Uncle Charlie’s wife Thora. One billy was for drinking milk (it was unpasteurised). The other Mum set for skimming. We had rich thick farm cream on porridge and pudding, and plenty left over for home-made butter. Mum gave her butter ration coupons to Thora who made shortbread for the two households. The dogs drank the skim milk. Pop kept a pig once, it also drank the skimmed milk but he hated killing it, he'd made such a pet of it. Childhood lore was that skim milk pork possessed more flavour than whey-fed.

Across the creek from our cottage was Pop's hay-paddock, full of red clover and drowsy bumblebees. Cutting created great excitement. Two big Clydesdales pulled around the cutter in ever decreasing circles. Anxiety dominated while the grass dried, Pop surveying the sky, fretting at the least sign of rain. Until it was stooked he worried. Before and after they were covered by the tarps it was great fun to slide down the stooks, no-one seemed to mind though we were warned about the dangers of pitch-forks. Before long a tractor replaced the horses and a baler the stooks. One crop got damp, so Pop had to keep shifting the bales around to let them cool. Haystacks and haybarns frequently caught on fire - spontaneous combustion people explained, it seemed one of life's wonders to me. Pop's survived, however. Shifting the hay meant mouse-hunts, great fun for boys and dogs, and a grandfather. The hay - winter food for horse and house cow, and insurance for cattle and sheep if there was snow, otherwise stock was left to take care of itself. Breeding ewes got first attention if a cold snap set in, they carried next year's income. Quite a number of Peninsula farmers had a form of winter transhumance, they drove their sheep to farms on the plains where they wintered over on turnips and lucerne. Dick, my stepfather, did this, but Pop didn't, his bottom farm countered his two in the heights.

Farm work was seasonal. - cattle being dehorned, calves castrated, lambs tailed, all bloody and noisy procedures. Fat lambs needed drafting - the frenzied call of lambs separated from their mothers is an omnipresent memory. Sheep with footrot needed to have hooves cleaned with bluestone. The way they winced suggests a painful process. Dipping was great fun. Pop possessed a tip-dip, a rare thing then. The sheep loaded, Pop pulled a lever and the pen tilted throwing the sheep into the foul-smelling dip, with a large splash. Occasionally one would balance precariously on the narrow ledge, Pop would use his stick to push them in. He’d duck their heads under to make sure all the ticks were killed. The chute gate opened, the sodden animals clambered out, the dip streaming off their wool, to shake themselves dry in the draining pens. The rams provided great fun, they hated the place. It took all the skill of Pop's dogs to get them up the ramp to the tilting pen. They would turn on the dogs, stamp their feet, "Back up", Pop would tell the dogs. Sometimes the rams charged, the dogs nimbly jumping over the rails out of the way. "Heel" Pop would say and Jill or King would go for the nose or ankle - the ram would hurry up the ramp, the dogs bouncing gleefully behind. Pop would pull the lever, the rams would splash into the dip, the dogs surveying over the edge, carnivorous mastery over lesser herbivores.

Once as Pop went to duck a sheep it swerved, he missed and fell in. Luckily I was there to pull up the gate to let him clamber out spluttering and choking, otherwise he could have drowned. When Granny berated him he said he always made sure he had someone else there when he dipped. “That daydreamer” I overheard.

Each night before school Mum made sandwiches for our lunch, mutton, jam or marmite. As we got older Doug and I took over this chore. Mum spoke longingly of oranges and pineapples, but despite the war there was plenty of seasonal fresh food. We called our meals breakfast, dinner and tea, eaten off the oil-clothed drop-leaf table. If guests came Mum put a cloth on. Breakfast in the winter was usually porridge, Creamota from the packets with Sergeant Dan on them, in the summer Kornies, "everybody's breakfast" the radio ads told us. Most meals consisted of mutton, either hot or cold, mutton soup all winter, fried chops often, neck stew. Always with mashed potato except for the Sunday roast. People ask if such a daily diet of mutton and spud wasn’t monotonous. Certainly at the time it did not seem so, it was what people ate. Uncle Tom killed a pig for Christmas and Easter, so pork became for me the symbol of celebration. Mum made brawn, chopping the cooked pigs-head apart with a sharp tomahawk. Pop always ate the trotters. When the young roosters got three-quarter grown it was axe time for them, Mum and Granny saving the feathers to stuff cushions. Sausages were a treat, whenever Pop or Mum went through to town, as was corn beef.

In late spring Uncle Tom's black-currant bushes would be laden, for a couple of days we couldn't use the bath, Mum would be making jelly, the juice oozing through the muslin bags hung over large basins. Other neighbours possessed gooseberry bushes. In autumn we would collect large field mushrooms in a bucket while during the summer we would harvest watercress from the creek margins. At school they told us to dig for victory. Pop and Mum did their share with their big vegetable patches. Each autumn Mum would plant lupin and each spring she would dig it in to add nitrogen to the soil. She planted three apple trees, granny smith, red delicious, cox's orange, lovely names.

When Mum married Dick we shifted to a farm at the top of Okuti valley on the east side of Little River. The house was large and old weatherboard with a verandah running along its western front, and the inevtiable red corrugated iron roof. Scattered behind it was a garage with a haybarn on top, store-sheds, an earth-floored stable and saddle room full of old harness and other paraphernalia not sold at the clearing sale, a fowl-house, a cowshed and a pig-sty. Beside it, the large orchard had pear and apple trees and a rampant raspberry patch. The first apple to ripen was an Irish Peach - a pile of tree-ripened fruit and a good book was boyhood bliss. The woolshed, sheepyards and dip were on the next ridge. The farm was well-watered, well-sheltered, stocked with 650 Romney cross ewes, a small Southdown pedigree flock (rams and ewes), some Hereford cattle, and a large flock of noisy geese. Several paddocks were full of bracken. One paddock which I christened Foxglove Knoll blazed with colour - I have never seen so many foxgloves in one place. The divide at the top looked down on French Farm on Akaroa Harbour - Dick had 150 acres over that side.

Mum says this was the best time. For that Dick must be given the credit - plus her own resilience and courage. She loved being out with him. The widowed woman blossomed again. I am pleased life treated her generously then - for Dick also died young.

Blessed

BLESSED

Synchronised swimmers
under-carriage obvious
seeking nectar, almost
in unison, two silver
-eyes move mice-like
amidst orange abutilon
bells

Such a scene as
would loose an albatross
from off a mariner’s neck

The word ‘blessed’ bounds
around my skull. Antiquated, but
in this instance, extremely legitimate.

Having seen this scene at lunch-time today I sat down and wrote the poem. Looking at it now I wonder whether I could leave the second stanza entirely out. It's said in the last stanza. Or maybe it is necessary. I invite your opinion.

Taxes & Wars

One defining event of the present government will be Bill English’s 2010 Budget, It seems clear it will attempt to bed in certain tax changes. I dislike the words ‘tax reform’. Reform suggests improvement. The form of taxation changes, it doesn’t improve. At various times windows and lavatories have been taxed. The only constant is that taxation continues. Our present parliament has its origins in the fact that in the Middle Ages the kings of England needed money to pay for their invasions in Scotland and France. To get that money they needed consent to raise taxes.

There are two approaches in the modern world to tax changes. One is the bold cut through all the red tape. That tends to produce many casualties. The other is the slow increment of changes refining the system and attempting to make it more efficient. Of course, the balancing factor is the effectiveness of the systems dispersing tax income.

I had an email from a friend yesterday asking why I haven’t commented upon the tax taskforces and their comments about the Cullen Fund and Kiwisaver. The Brash report was so predictable it hardly warrants mention. Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson applied that prescription. It didn’t work. So, let’s move on. Though in passing I mention that in my understanding Australians pay more taxes than we do.

I always saw Brash’s appointment as a stalking horse for the National led-government to launch later its own initiatives. To switch cliches its purpose was to serve as a smokescreen. Time will tell. But like all administrations the government has less room to maneuver than ministers would like. Mr Cullen made sure of that.

I was saddened at the earlier tinkering with the Cullen Fund. Further cuts could damage the whole scheme. I hoped we could get inter-party agreement on super but that’s probably an idealistic pipe-dream. Which means lurches in the form of policy changes. That effects the livelihood and morale of thousands.

Kiwisaver is basically below my radar. Friends with more economic savvy than I have were not enthusiastic but it seemed to me a scheme which encouraged saving was a step in the right direction. It would be a shame to see it turned into an unworkable one, or even destroyed. Probably Labour should have started it earlier but that is the nature of politics. The gaining and retention of power takes precedence over policy consistency. There are also electoral shibboleths – tinker with these at your peril. There are also questions of leadership – can a government switch direction by selling a vision.

Obama sold the vision in a campaign based upon one word, ‘hope’. Now, he is learning as his predecessors had he has less room for change than he anticipated. Thompson in his book about the Cold War outlines how each president in turn was hamstrung by previous commitments, decisions and lobbyists. And their own decisions. Kennedy’s disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion convinced the Russians of his weakness. So they started to put missiles on Cuba. For a while it seemed the planet hovered on the brink of an all-out nuclear war. The Russians blinked and withdrew. I hadn’t realised until I read Thompson how far the Russians had gone. It was not just missiles, it was smaller nuclear weapons. Kennedy exhibited courage.

As I believe Obama has over Afghanistan. It’s a gamble. By putting an exit date into the mix he has given a hostage to the future. But Thompson provides a chilling account of America stumbling further and further into the Viet Nam quagmire.

But wars require money. The American taxpayer is like any taxpayer any where. The exit strategy softens the financial implications of the president’s decision. Politicians are interested in power. They are usually reluctant to do things that will alienate the electoral majority. Key and English have strategically been at pains to keep to the political centre. Next year’s budget should give a real glimpse of their long-term aims.

The Old Poet

The Old Poet

The aging poet – milk teeth cut on the romantics,
the second lot grew while he studied those whose
whole world edged towards the inescapable combat –
reads a modern anthology with regret but
without envy at their poise & certitude.
He turns as is his custom to the introduction
last & slams it down in dispute with the author.
Accepting he’s getting to the stage of being
beyond new tricks he toys with a letter.
‘while it might be contemporary to avoid
the moral tone it would also help if we who
use it are not attacked so hurtfully & heedlessly.’
He doesn’t write it. The world can not
comprehend that once in dreams of goddesses
& justice, to him paradise appeared quite possible

Harvey McQueen

This poem carries an interesting history. When it appeared in my last poetry collection, Recessional, The Dominion Post selected it for its weekly Wednesday poem. A fellow poet asked me what was the anthology I was writing about. It was an imaginary one. This poem is interesting for I normally move from the personal to the more objective. The process of writing this one was the reverse.

I’d read a letter, bristling with indignation, in the Spectator I think, from an elderly curmudgeonly guy complaining about modern writers’ lack of moral values. The mood struck a spark. I began a poem about an old retired bull brooding in a paddock about the foolishness of his successors. The artificiality of that metaphor quickly became obvious and I discarded it.

What emerged was this rather succinct biographical piece. But I stress, the character that is created is a personae rather than the actual me. It is true that my first poetic love was Keats and his fellow romantics and the second more mature was Eliot and Auden. But the picture of that naive young writer, chivalrous and idealistic, buffeted by and misunderstood down the years is not the full story.

It is a poem. It is not Harvey McQueen but something he has created. There is a difference.

The Hawk & The Dove

I am reading Nicholas Thompson’s The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War. Thompson is Nitze’s grandson and had access to his papers. Kennan’s diaries enable him to give an impartial account of the struggle for policy control between the two men with their widely differing approaches to dealing with the Soviet Union. They agreed on containment, but not the means to that end. A feature of their friendship is the civility of their discourse despite huge disagreement.

The contrast between them is an interesting approach to the foreign policy history of the USA during the Cold War. Nitze is presented as a hard-nosed realist, arguing for the development of the H-bomb. If they did not pursue it the Russians would. Containment must be backed up by military strength. Kennan was more conflicted – horrified at the massive arms build-up and the prospect of nuclear obliteration, and brooding over the impossibility of enforcing the American way of life on sovereign nations. To him, containment meant that in time the ‘evil empire’ would disintegrate from within.

Well-written, the book is very readable. I especially enjoyed the Korean War section and the concerns in Washington over McArthur’s imperial leadership. I’d almost forgotten that American and Chinese troops had fought each other during that war. The legacy of that conflict lingered long in the minds of the American public and policy-makers.

President Truman emerged with credit when he dismissed McArthur. The book abounds with little revealing vignettes and anecdotes. Like when Openheimer who directed the atomic bomb development met Truman and said ‘I’ve blood on my hands;' afterwards, Truman exploded to an aide, expletives removed, something to the effect of ‘how much more do I have on my hands.’

This was the world in which I grew up. Those two conflicting views were background to my development. In the book Eisenhower has just been elected – the two men are briefly on the outer. Ahead there is Dulles, Suez, Hungary, Cuba, Viet Nam, Nixon's visit to China. I know the general history outline but not the individual stories of the two men. History through biography, that’s an interesting twist to provide a satisfying read for the wintry start we are having to summer.

Photographs

Where ever I travelled, New Zealand or overseas, there always seemed to be Japanese taking photographs. Especially, before the digital age, I wonder where they stored them all. Even in their homeland they took thousands.

In my first visit to Japan, after attending a conference in Hiroshima, I travelled as a tourist. The Japanese Tourist Board had given me a chit which roughly translated said ‘take this guy to a decent traditional Japanese inn.’ When I got off the train I presented this to a taxi driver and very soon I was being met with bows and escorted to my room. I had been warned about sleeping on the floor – futons are comfortable – not being spoken to in English – hand signals seem universal – and communal bathing – it never happened, I always had private facilities.

I got as far south as Beppu – a thermal resort like Rotorua. There I decided the best way to see around was to join a tour. The rest of the group were elderly Japanese tourists. I realised I had been adopted as the tour curiosity. At every stop I had to join obligatory groups to be snapped again and again. Relatives must have got bored at seeing this hairy barbarian (I was bearded those days) popping up in photograph after photograph.

Back in Tokyo I took another bus tour – this time to Hakone, a lake resort high up in the hills. At the first view of Mt Fujiama the bus stopped for everyone to take a photo. The mountain was a long way away and there was nothing to frame against it so I didn't bother. It looked like Egmont. Behind us a farming group were harvesting rice by hand – it looked timeless. I lined up for a photo only to have a restraining hand on my elbow. It was the diminutive tour guide. She turned me firmly around and pointed at the sacred mountain. That was the view. I was equally determined and turned back. She was agitatedly adamant – I did wonder if she did not want me to portray her people as backward but thinking about it afterwards I’m sure she merely wanted me to get the right photograph. I let her have her way. She stood beside me till I pressed the shutter on the correct view.

I too have a pile of photos I have taken down the years. My slides got mildew so I threw them out. When I’m gone most of those photos will have the same fate. It all goes so fast. Experience, finally, is beyond capture. One of Ian Wedde’s commonplace odes captures that mood very well.

TO THE TIN TRUNK OF IMAGES

To me the Fates have given scorn for the envious.
Time’s no flood, it bears nothing
Away, and only light catches it, shuttered on memory.
Let the heart rejoice in what ever it has right now.
What is we hold up between us, my brother

And I? It’s our father’s satisfaction, it’s food
For the table, it’s a monument he never dreamed he’d see
In the Ufizzi, it’s his wife in a camelhair coat
By a DC3, with a camel in the Wadi
Araba and among the weathered pyramids of Dashoon.

Now it’s a show, it’s a thousand sunsets on the Nile,
On the bay of Bengal, on the waters of Lake Constance,
And he was never satisfied with them. Far horizons, blue
And made of rocks, are what he also saw.
Sometimes he was happy with the spired horizons of cities

But which cities? And what Gods are worshipped
Beneath those turquoise domes? What was sacrificed
On those basalt altars, tumbled in black ruins
Across what valleys foraged by goats, sheep
Or llamas? What tunes have faded away?

Where are we now? No longer in
The picture, which is now a picture of my father’s loneliness.
He survives in roguish snapshots taken in restaurants.
A plate of quail in Damascus. But never in the tin
Trunk of photographs because he took them all.

November's End

The price of beer is expected to go up. There is a shortage of hops. A few years ago there was over-supply. So world-wide growers ripped out their plants. Now there are not enough. In an early Stage 1 Economics lecture I learnt about the hog-cycle. Too many pigs. Not enough profit. So farmers cut down the numbers. Prices rise. In an effort to cash in on the boom farmers increased numbers. And so the system perpetuates itself. It seemed to me even then that a canny farmer would take the long view. But I suppose many are in no position to do that. At least pigs can be breed quickly. Plants take longer to mature. But people will always drink beer.

I would that my illness was as cyclical. I had a strange wishful dream last night. I was at a conference, it seemed American, the word Seattle hovered in my consciousness. One of the guys there was a hockey guru. After a day’s discussion he and I would take our hockey sticks down to a park and practice the skills of shooting and trapping. After the conference ended I hired a rental car and drove over a high pass on a winding road – it seemed like Dyer’s Pass - to a beach beside a gorgeous, placid harbour. I wandered along the beach until I reached an old gun-site where sitting on a concrete pier I skipped stones across still water. Skills I’ll never use again.

Ali and David came for lunch yesterday. They brought me a belated birthday gift, a lemon tree in a container. The Dublin Bay rose they gave us when we settled here is blooming well. In time we should be able to harvest our own lemons, with memories of the tree's origin. Anne and they went off to a presentation of Handel’s Messiah. I’m delighted Anne could go. Hearing it each year is part of her Christmas tradition. I watched the rugby replay while they were out. In an exciting, indeed commanding display the All Blacks beat France 39 to 12.

Ali and David also lent me the complete DVD set of Simon Schama’s History of Britain. I am grateful for the opportunity to see it in its entirety. I saw most of the series when it was shown here in the early years of this century. It's also good to see it on a larger screen.

I watched the first episode last night It starts with the Stone Age village of Skara Brae in west Orkney. Over the next four thousand years, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Vikings and Christian missionaries arrived and made their contribution. On my first visit to England I visited the sites of several of the burial barrows of those ancient Britons. The stone circles of Avebury and Stonehenge I found breath-taking and the size of Maiden Castle was awe-inspiring. We have mainly only conjecture and imagination to get a handle on the society that created these things. These people are amongst my ancestors. We have clues about how they lived but what did they think and feel? Schama rightly gives credit to Bede – who left a record of his period and his own experience. I’ve seen Bede’s tombstone in Durham Castle.

I also watched half of the second episode which was about 1066, the last successful invasion of Britian. The major visual source was the Bayeux tapestry which I had greatly enjoyed seeing in my 1999 visit to Normandy. I always felt sorry for Harold, having to fight on two fronts, first, his rebellious brother with his Viking hordes in Yorkshire and then, William the Bastard, soon to be renamed the Conqueror, on the south coast.

Worrying financial news from Dubai. If the oil barons have over-committed themselves and cannot meet repayments then heaven help the rest of us. Oil prices could sky-rocket – which in the long run could be a good thing, forcing research into alternative forms of energy. A different level of the hog cycle.

Today’s the last day of November. Three year’s ago we first saw the place where we now live. Here are selected excerpts from my diary for that day. ‘A howling gale all night. Four Wellington houses lost their roofs. ... We drove to look at a town house. ... Quite a long driveway and there at the end was the house, quiet, big and modern. It had almost all the requirements we wanted with two exceptions. It was NE facing and would not get much late sun. The garden was entirely camelia and roses – and a lemon - with little space for a raised herb patch. Virtues: A downstairs bathroom and an upstairs bathroom. Very close to shops and bus route. Within walking distance of Mall and library. No change needed. Garage with internal access. Built in bookshelves. Gas. Separate laundry. We both fell in love with it. Probably us and a dozen others. ... Back home I made arrangements for Larry [our builder] to look at the town house tomorrow. ... Don Brash has quit politics. He looked quite relieved on TV. Having watched the headlines, Brash overshadowed by Fiji, we turned the TV off and discussed an offer for the town house. [We reached a decision. The Rubicon was crossed]. ... Rereading Ian Wedde’s Sonnets for Carlos. What a wonderful series it is, the wonderment of fatherhood and the delight in existence.

Wedde’s Commonplace Odes is my poetry companion at present. A fitting comment to end a blog that begins with the hog cycle.