Why Stoat Spring?

This blog is settling into a pattern similar to an old time movie session. Cartoons, newsreels & brief clips followed by interval and then the main feature.

a) I’ve reservations about science. I don’t like it monkeying around with the essence of human existence. But I must admit I would not be alive but for scientific and technological breakthroughs.
b) I was to go to Te Papa yesterday to see the Impressionist exhibition of paintings from Boston. Anne had a wheelchair booked. But a stomach upset in the morning put paid to that plan. She went without me with Jonathan her son, who majored in art history. They arrived home raving about the Monet and Renoir. Renoir is my favourite painter, humanity at play amidst light and shade. But Monet’s haystacks, waterlillies, green bridge, London scenes, Rouen cathedral are also amongst my preferred paintings. We’ve been to Giverny his home and garden, a memorable visit. The surprise was his large collection of Japanese prints, many very erotic. I can visualise him and Clemencau walking and talking in that garden. I hope I can see the exhibition before it closes.
c) My stay at home meant I was here when a friend, Brian Clark unexpectedly called. Brian taught with me at Melville High School in Hamilton and then worked with me when I was Executive Director of the New Zealand Council for Teacher Education. Brian’s wife has a contract in Brisbane. He’s finding the humidity and heat there very trying. Their two cats are enjoying catching an endless supply of lizards and he has a bush turkey nesting in their back yard.
d) Lesley brought us as a wedding anniversary present a swan plant with two monarch butterfly caterpillars on it on Tuesday. Her idea was that they would interest me. She was right. I christened them Groucho and Marx. We both became involved in their progress. To our dismay, by yesterday morning, voracious feeders, they’d eaten every leaf on the bush. So Anne went out early on a rescue mission to Mitre 10. She said ‘I feel responsible for them.’ Two new plants later, transfer effected auspiciously, they happily chomping away, we felt we’d played God very well. I never ever thought I’d care about a caterpillar. Poor Anne, the fact that there was no alternative to her going is an another example of how my health affects our activities. Which is a nonsense sentence because there was an alternative, not to go, and let them starve, but we never thought of not doing a mercy mission.

I’ve been asked why my blog is called Stoatspring? Simple! My second volume of poems, published 1983, is called Stoat Spring. When I was creating the blog we found title suggestion after suggestion had already been used. It took us ages to find an acceptable one. It’s a good one for it is a volume I’m particularly pleased about. A favourite childhood book was Mortimer Batten’s Some British Wild Animals. In his chapter on stoats he told of a box-trap set for rabbits. One night, two rabbits, a tom-cat and a stoat fell in. It would have been a lively night for in the morning it contained two dead rabbits, one mangled, dying cat and a very frisky stoat.

The closest I ever got to a stoat was in Delphi in Greece. The guide had taken us to the ruins of the old stadium high above the temple remnants. Remote from the group I was sitting on a piece of masonry. Suddenly this stoat popped out beside me. Standing on his hind legs he surveyed the scene, a beautiful and deadly creature. I’d seen the carnage either a stoat or weasel had committed in our fowlshed at Okuti. Thereafter the chooks roosted in the old macrocarpas behind the house.

The volume comprised a series of poems written over a period when after the end of my first marriage I began my relationship with Anne, a rather fraught though sparkling time. I was also under stress at work – bureaucratic middle management with all its frustrations and powerlessness. I see the blurb at the back of the book says ‘he earns his keep as Assistant-Director Curriculum Development, in the Department of Education.’ Most of the poems were written before I took up that position when I worked for Schools Supervision, an unwise career move in terms of satisfaction. I collapsed the poems of a few years into a sequence of a spring season and made stoat a metaphor for my feelings of discontent and exhilaration. It was a good time and a bad time. I was reading Hughes and Larkin and their hawk and toad were in my mind. Before publication one evening I was reading poems at the old Circa theatre. Api Taylor preceded me, such power left me daunted. Anyway after my reading while I was sipping a wine one of the band that was backing our readings said why don’t you get Bruce the drummer to illustrate your book. Bruce Rothwell, a wallpaper designer, drew stoats as a hobby. So he did. On my study wall is this picture with six stoat drawings in it

The poem begins:

Spring
and gin, the traps
slam shut.
Inside middle management
stoat and cat fang rabbit;
then circle
circle one another.
Cat leaps
Too late!

Along the way I explore the nuclear threat (Mururoa tests were underway) poetry critics, love’s affirmations and ups and downs, the washing machine flooding the laudry floor, the garden, life, history, climbing Cave Rock at Sumner with my mother and above all, the workplace.

The office has its boltholes,
they bar the winter winds:
only the rich
or vagabonds
can afford the sun
open space
and the chance to outpace
that sliding and elusive shadow.

I remember writing those lines. It was a Saturday and the rain was pelting down. I’d spent the week in the office, a glorious September week with full sunshine. The penultimate poem describe the work Christmas party, ‘the office/ rings with satisfaction, sausage/ rolls and grog.’
A colleague slaps gin into a glass,
states he ‘couldn’t give a damn.’
I do, stoat
I do

The poem ends:

We lay our drains until banks
burst
then boat the paddocks, rescue
stock. For a while the heart enjoys
the risk as yesterday's pig sty
tin drum
dream house
float
down the creek. When the flood
recedes we resettle & the bishop
climbs the pulpit, announces new tithes,
old taxes, they'll enclose a field,
rebuild a nave, get him a crimson
cap. No need to wait another winter.

Bureaucrats like sheep labour on
wear
lasting tracks into the fabric of events.
The system works until the design fault snaps.
Who doesn't like to run guns to the rebels?
(Evaporation - precipitation - respiration)
Silt cracks in the sun. Peasants plough.
Politicians check the profits. Money comes
and money goes; adds a little sherry to the trifle,
more blood to the revolution: a matter
of economics of hunger of physics of love.

Cox

During my time as a student at the University of Canterbury I stayed at Rolleston House hostel. One year early on I coxed the hostel rowing four against arch-rivals College House. What happened the evening of the race lingers in my memory, no doubt assisted by a slight sense of shame. Before the race we practised regularly. Kerr’s Reach on the Avon River had not yet been cut. The start was near Avonside Girl’s with the finish at the rowing sheds off Fitzgerald Avenue. We trained for it - up early on an autumn morning we’d put our skiff into the water at the sheds and row leisurely downstream to the course where we would turn and row at racing speed upstream – for cox a lovely sensation; the misty river, the rowers in unison, the thin shell of the boat sliding over the surface, crisp air, the weeping willows dragging in the water, a duck slipping off the bank to paddle away from our intrusion, the early morning cars and cyclists a background noise behind the slap of our oars and my calling the rating.
We passed under a bridge, not much room to spare – a tense moment. We practised at speed, lining up objects to get us through without losing momentum. Never once did I make the wrong computation - a bad omen. To my chagrin, in the Capping Week race, with the two boats side by side at the bridge I misjudged space and speed; bow's oar clipping a bridge support. Flung off balance we slipped sideways to tangle with the oars of the other boat, which meant disqualification. Feeling mortified - not only had I let myself down but also the other four and the hostel, I expected recrimination and abuse, but all I mainly received good-natured chaffing - "the lengths a cox will go to avoid being chucked in the river". "You'll have to make sure we win the drinking horn."

We’d trained for that too. After hockey we would swagger off to the pub and share a jug. As a Presbyterian Ministry trainee I was supposed to practise moderation, but to the others my calling made me fair game. Sinners themselves they wanted to tempt me, urging me to "down it" so they could refill. In an unexpected way my future livelihood protected me. The others knew I couldn't afford to buy several jugs, so I'd buy one early and that served as a token. I would sit on a near full glass and watch the smoke-filled male preserve in action all around me. Beer provided an excuse to say things normally not said. After a few sips the mildest fellow would start telling a crude yarn or boasting loudly, the alcohol not even cleared from his stomach. My attendance was a form of dancing with the devil - how close could I go without compromise, each step fraying a little more the edges around my conscience. Near six o' clock closing the 'half g's' would be filled. "Time gentlemen please". We'd walk back to the hostel, supporting those who needed assistance.

Rolleston House had held the rowing drinking horn for a long time. The race on the water might be lost but honour demanded we retain this trophy. Inexperienced, I had trouble downing beer quickly, "not letting it touch the sides of your throat". Back at the hostel I practised with water or lemonade, but in the pub training was serious with the real thing. The confusion created in my head was warmly pleasant. Now it was my turn to be supported back to the hostel, where I would collapse on my bed and sleep through dinner to wake cold, hungry and sore-headed. Initiation, errors of judgement, feelings of guilt, humiliation, and exhilaration - part of acceptance into the Kiwi male world of that period.

Six o clock closing - it was another era. Like standing for the national anthem at the movies accepted as a natural part of life. Long before the call of "Time gentleman please" most drinkers tried to load as much beer as possible into their system. It was invitation to drink quickly and beyond capacity. I couldn’t afford whisky chasers, but for those who could it was a means of accelerating the process. The noise and din - also cigarette smoke - was part and parcel of the performance as were the men staggering out on their way home to waiting meals. The urinals dotted around our cities marking the end of the now pulled up tram-lines tell their own story.

After the fiasco on the river there in the Clarendon my reputation was really on the line. Cox drank last. We had a practice run, watching our opponents and drinking in time with them. Then it was the contest. We got ahead slightly, but I could see when it was my turn that we would be in trouble for my opponent was a hard-doer. Swallowing manfully, I was aware he was drawing level. As we neared the finish I flicked the last of my glass's content out and over the barman as I slammed it down empty. As the barman mopped himself down pandemonium reigned all around me - "He cheated" - "Nah, he didn't, just a bit of froth" - "You ought to be an actor mate" - "Just a drop and you make it look as if it was the Pacific Ocean" - "Yuh did it too". Rematch. "Do it again," stroke muttered. I did. More hilarity and abuse. I was beginning to feel warm and contented, the centre of attention. Stirrings of conscience, I quietened by telling that blurring organ that two of the other team were Anglican trainees. Stroke knew their weakness. My four comrades could hold their liquor better. If I was our weak link they possessed two. Rematch led to rematch as excuse followed excuse. At a quarter to six we breasted the bar for the final encounter. By the time it came my turn to drink we were so far ahead I could down mine at a leisurely canter. The trophy remained in our hands. Shouting and singing we staggered home. At the serving counter matron Sheila Fieldhouse said rather frostily, "You've had too much to drink." "Nonsense!" She was right. Hastily I left the table to lose the afternoon's celebrations in the quad – the first time that had happened. Ashamed, yet feeling some test had been passed, I was led off to my room, and tucked in with a bowl beside my head. What I had done often for others had now been done to me.

Phys Ed

A few brief prologues:
a) A monarch butterfly drifted in twice this afternoon through the open French sliders. Why my concern for its well-being? The scale of values we apply to things.
b) I’m a terrible proof-reader. Trouble is I learnt to speed read as a youth. I skim down a page looking for meaning. So I often miss spelling mistakes. I see in yesterday’s Gibbon piece I imply New Zealand has had no wars. I meant in my lifetime & not on our soil. I have never heard the sounds of guns fired in anger.
c) Monday was our wedding anniversary – 24 years. 30 years actually together. A lot of memories. We celebrated with food. Melon and prosciutto with a drizzle of lemon for lunch – one of the most divine flavour combinations - and Cloudy Bay oysters followed by grilled salmon fillets for dinner.
d) I spellchecked prosciutto. It suggested prostitute

Phys Ed

District High Schools increased five-fold in numbers between 1894 and 1914, part of a spectacular development after Seddon’s government offered secondary school free places. Historians tend to be cynical about Seddon’s education reform giving credit to Hogben for them. Seddon’s mother was a school-teacher, like many under-educated people he may have valued it more than we imagine. Holyoake is rather similar. The secondary part of Akaroa opened in 1901, and the manual training section in 1908 near the smaller wharf. When I went there as a student the school reflected different education architectural styles. The manual rooms, with their high stud and small windows with no view except the sky, contrasted with the new, airy secondary block built in 1936 at the south end of the town. For a while students from the outer bays stayed in a hostel for the week, but it had been replaced by a school bus service round the harbour. Parents from outlying eastern bays brought their sons and daughters over to link up with this service, or else privately boarded them in Akaroa.

Mrs Brocherie’s where I boarded had blue penguins nesting under her coal shed. When I filled up the coal bucket there was this great racket as the parents chattered their alarm. To get to Akaroa I caught the Christchurch-Akaroa Road Service bus at Little River just before 9 on Monday morning. This meant not arriving at school till after 10. In this double period Geometry was taught, so all my subsequent life I have been deficient in this area of maths. At the time this seemed irrelevant. The bus left at 3 30 pm on Friday for the return trip.

The first lessons stressed the town's history. In August 1838 a French whaler, Captain L'Anglois, purchased Banks Peninsula from the local Maori. Back in France there was talk of establishing a penal colony, but eventually this faded and 63 settlers, including a few Germans, (two of whom are ancestors) set sail in February 1840. They arrived on 13 August, two days after the French frigate L'Aube under Commodore Lavaud, but importantly three days after the British, Captain Stanley on the H.M.S. Britomart. To us it was presented as a dramatic race, the British just arrived in the nick of time to prevent the French claiming the South Island. According to Miss Greenwood, Lavaud let slip to Governor Hobson the frigate's destination and his nation's plans. "in his cups." She seized the opportunity to elaborate on the perils of the demon drink. Otherwise we would be speaking French. Historically the race is not true, but it makes a good tale and a splendid way of gaining attention. We also knew what the whole town knew, Miss Greenwood liked her gin and tonic.

Though the French settlement had all the problems of all early settlements - land to be cleared, no grain or vegetables for a while, and even when crops were mature seed had to be kept for the next planting - it was a safe anchorage for whaler and sealer. Once the settlers got established they could supply passing ships. This led to shipbuilding. In fact timber became the main industry. Old weatherboard houses at Akaroa still revealed pit-sawn timber.

The department had two teachers. Mr Arnold ran the big room where Science, Maths, Agriculture and History were taught. It had a row of science sinks along the north wall, a locked cupboard of chemicals and a fume box. That room always held the lingering smell of a lab. He retired half-way through my time there to be replaced by Mr Mahar. Miss Greenwood ran the second room - English, Social Studies, Geography, Art, Music and Horticulture. A bright boy I did well in both rooms.
The department was very run down, especially in equipment. During my fourth form year, after the inspectors had spent time in the two classrooms, they remained closeted with the two teachers and the primary principal for ages. Sensing something was up, we played impromptu games outside until a very grim-faced Miss Greenwood called us in. Years later I learnt the reason. Apparently Miss Tindall, who had reduced me to tears at my inability to solve a physics problem – I’d got the right answer intuitively, but she believed I’d cheated - declared her unwillingness to sign the certificates for the practical science course and had been extremely critical of the physical education programme. She was talked into signing by Mr Mahar on agreement to get new equipment and materials. Box after box arrived to be excitedly opened and stored under his direction. As a lab monitor I happily helped him label and shelve.

When Miss Tindall came back a year latter Mr Mahar prepared well. He etherised a frog, and rather nervously opened it up to expose its living heart. The process was just getting interesting when dramatically a girl fainted, followed by two of the boys sitting down expressing feelings of wobbliness. In the ensuring mayhem the lesson was forgotten. What Miss Tindall said on this occasion is not known. Mr Mahar went up in our estimation - he took the fight to the enemy.

Mr Arnold let us play sports during phys ed time. I liked the tennis – my primary school had the local courts alongside so I’d learnt to play, but cricket and rugby were nerve-wracking. The two best boys would toss and then pick in turn those they wanted to play in their team. Nervously I waited to see when I would be picked. Being picked near the end was not a lesson in confidence. In rugby I was well-down the list. Cricket was not quite so bad. With a reasonable eye and reflexes, shoulders powerful from swinging an axe, I was usually frustratingly caught after a few lusty blows. Mr Mahar did attempt to show us how to hold a bat and bowl a ball and he gave us catching practice. Most of the boys considered this a waste of time, they wanted to get on and play. Secretly I disagreed, and regretted not having improved those skills earlier.

The new phys education equipment including a vaulting horse which I loathed. We actually had to jump over the bloody thing. After I'd baulked several times Mr Mahar would stand beside it to help me over, a process which usually ended crushing my testicles against the saddle. In agony I would go back to try again. The tumbling mats were OK, though graceful I never was. My destiny lacked the words ‘physical prowess’. One would never have guessed that I would end up in charge of PE syllabus revision when I was Assistant Director, Curriculum Development in the old Department of Education

I enjoyed this responsibility immensely, members of the working party included national players, (including Jeremy Coney one of the wittiest men I’ve ever met), top coaches and high level administrators as well as teachers and university people, all very bronzed and fit. Unbeknown to them I carried a recollection from my inspector days when I was as experienced as three years in the job could make one. A liaison visit was to Matakana District High School on the island that separates Tauranga Harbour from the ocean. A new inspector whose specialty was physical education had just started in the Hamilton team. "Take Joe Hughes with you," my boss said, “show him the ropes.” We jet-boated across the harbour to the small school. Joe did a better job than I at eating the kina, which the locals provided for lunch.

Last period of the day was physical education. "I look forward to that", Joe said. I stayed talking to the principal while he went down to the harbour to watch the swimming lesson. He came back, his eyes on stalks. Apparently the whole school, nearly all Maori, had stripped naked, the elder pupils helping the younger ones and then all dived into the sea and waded or swam across to a small island where they sat eating blackberries and splashing in the shallows. At the whistle they all swam back, the elder pupils then drying and dressing the small ones and shyacking back to school. "It was lovely, the closest thing to Eden I'll ever see", Joe said. "But was it Phys Ed?" I asked. "It was life", Joe replied; who throughout his stint in the inspectorate infuriated and amused us all by his eager one-eyed advocacy for his cause. As the committee discussed objectives, learning experiences and the best ways to teach eye/hand co-ordination I polished that memory, life’s winners and losers. Education has a tendency to inflationary earnestness that loses friends.

Gibbon

I have always been aware how fragile the veneer of civilisation is. It was my good fortune to be born in a country that has not known war, famine or tyranny. I was reminded of this by the two books I’m reading at present. One is This Is London Calling, Good Evening by George Angeloglou. The other is The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilisation by Bryan Ward-Perkins. The first is the story of the Greek Section of the BBC 1939-57. It was lent to us by our neighbours, the husband’s sister married Angelogloua. He was in control of the BBC Greek Section during the war and after. There are graphic accounts of the Blitz and broadcasting during Britain’s ‘finest hour’. I’ve always found it hard to reconcile the glories of Mozart and Beethoven with the horrors of Belsen.

The Ward-Perkins book reiterates the Gibbon argument, that the Barbarian invasions ushered in the Dark Ages. It ends:
‘There is a real danger for the present day in a vision of the past that explicitly sets out to eliminate all crisis and decline. The end of the Roman West witnessed horrors and dislocation of a kind I sincerely hope never to have to live through: and it destroyed a complex civilisation, throwing the inhabitants of the West back to a standard of living typical of prehistoric times. Romans before the fall were as certain as we are today that their world would continue for ever substantially unchanged. They were wrong. We would be wise not to repeat their complacency.’

In my second year teaching I bought at Pauls Book Arcade in Hamilton an abridged copy of Gibbons famous history of the decline of the Roman Empire. Magnificent prose! I’ve read it four times. It shaped my world-view – the Greek/Roman world overthrown by the invading hordes from the north in the west and the remaining empire in the east becoming decadent and no longer Roman. That idea has been challenged recently. The barbarians became Roman citizens and carried on the values. Ward-Perkins rebuts this, restoring the Gibbon thesis.

His is essentially a pessimistic view. I’ve been conscious all my adult life of the possibilities of a nuclear war that would wipe out much of our civilisation. It is easy to foresee water wars and more oil wars. But I never conceived an economic and fiscal meltdown of the magnitude we appear to be facing. It could destroy much of what we take for granted. Will some historian in several centuries time write of our civilisation as Gibbon did of Rome?

Freud Would Have Had A Field-Day

Freud Would Have A Field Day

My earliest memory
aged four or maybe three
I watched my father dig
a hole for the dunny can
chooks scratching
the shovelled earth
just as the contents
were tipped in the big
Rhode Island red rooster
slipped & tumbled.
Unable to get out its
struggles increased its
fouling. My father hauled
it out upside down &
one-handedly working
the pump washed it
Released the bedraggled
fowl dragged itself to
the shed. Suddenly
a new hero in the yard.
the little subdued bantam
rooster began to crow

NCEA

When people learn that I’ve worked in education all my life they often ask my opinion – not in general but particularly assessment and curriculum. "You were an English teacher. What do you think about the decline of grammar?" Let’s park that one for a later blog. Let’s look at assessment.
I failed my first driver’s licence test. I was a university student. My stepfather had paid for lessons. But doing a u-turn on a Cashmere hill street in Christchurch I got the wheel stuck in the gutter and couldn’t back out. A few weeks later I had another go, This time I passed. But by no means was I a competent and effective driver. Seventeen years later I was appointed as an Inspector of Secondary Schools. Part of my preparation was a defensive driving course. The instructor complemented me upon my driving and said I was a natural defensive driver. I had learnt a lot of lessons along the way.
As a secondary school inspector I saw many science lessons. Every now and then an experiment didn’t work. And to have a ‘beak’ - as we were known - in the room as well, what a situation.. Basically, teachers had two methods of coping with this circumstance. The first was to explain what should have happened, write it up on the board and the students copied it down and were told to learn it for the exams. The others tried to get the kids to analyse why the experiment had failed. The fortunate ones could try again. Those, whose resource had been consumed in the first attempt, used chalk and talk, often some good lessons.
I thought of those experiences when I read the Royal Society in England has slammed top science school exams there on the grounds that they failed to prepare young people for the world of work or for university. The Society claimed that the exams concentrated on a narrow range of skills and a regurgitating of facts rather than encouraging students to experiment. It said: "we need a system of assessment that fuels pupils’ enthusiasm for the subject by opening up this exciting world of problem solving, discovery and innovation while at the same time supporting factual learning."
School exams were a holy cow in our society. People berate me about the so-called removal of exams. "I sat School C and it did me no harm." "What good did it do you?" "I’d three passes". "What had you learnt?" That’s the question that usually stumps them. They’d learnt to pass exams. Schools are about learning and we keep forgetting that. We tend to get so obsessed with assessments and measurement that we forget the many other reasons why schools exist.
Education is the human attempt to put systems and resources into place to assist learning – and if we are honest, to control it. Learning is something we all do. Learning has always been life-long, and increasingly education is seen as such. We learn by failure as well as success. Indeed, failure is the norm - at first. A child learning to walk falls many times before he or she confidently stays upright. We learn individually, but we also learn together. We learn by moving from the known to the unknown. Secondary teachers work with young people who are making the transition from dependence to independence. Becoming fully human means at some stage taking responsibility for your own learning needs – present jargon is, to take ownership.
The National Certificate in Educational Achievement, NCEA, has been promoted by successive governments. It’s an attempt to have a more sensible assessment of student learning and achievement, an essential building block for a knowledge society. It is an attempt to provide what the Royal Society calls the "exciting world of problem solving, discovery and innovation." Admittedly, the method of implementation created some problems. Discussion – sometimes heated - about that implementation clouded the basic issue.
In a midden near Hadrian’s Wall in the U.K. a child’s lesson from the second century A.D. was unearthed - a very poor copy of a passage from Virgil. At the bottom the teacher had scrawled, "sloppy". History doesn’t tell us whether an accurate copy was ever done. But we know a lot more about learning now. Schools exist to assist learning. We need to remember that when we talk about student failure and success.

MUM

My mother’s first husband, a farmer, was killed, thrown off his horse when I was five. Seven years later Mum remarried. Dick my stepfather, a returned soldier, also died young, of lung cancer. She lived alone for 35 years after that, never voicing the grief I've sensed in her. The dislocation of loss is the theme of her later life. It prematurely aged her, not just physically but socially. Young widowhood was frequent in the 19th century, but much less so in the later 20th. Still, she’d married two of the most eligible young men in Little River. Photos reveal a striking young woman.
She pre-existed me for over 22 years. It’s hard for me to imagine those years. Young and supple, she and her brothers were good at climbing trees. They’d collect sparrow eggs, blow them and when they had a shoe-box full they’d take them to the county office to collect a bounty. Gravely the clerk would count the eggs, pay them, enter the transaction in a register and then crush the box. She played knucklebones and marbles with her school mates. But her dreams and desires are lost. I’ve asked her once about the courtship of John McQueen. "We just went out together." That’s what people did then – they became a number, a step along the way to a church wedding, a honeymoon, and a family. I experienced the wooing of Dick Lee. My presence must have been a trial to them. I was a clingy child, the loss of a father didn’t help. The fact I have so many fond memories of Dick suggests she choose a good man.
"I've had a good trot," she says. As a life draws to an end there is the need to keep perspective – the events and experiences of a lifetime. Mum was born in 1912. So much has happened. She started life before the welfare state was envisaged. During her mature years it was constructed and now in her twilight years it has been partially dismantled. We are all part of history – it’s not just kings and queens, battles and pageants. That continuity thing.
She has never left our shores. But during her lifetime our isolation has dramatically lessened. She often recalls the day Kingsford Smith landed at Wigram after the first successful cross-Tasman plane flight. The family had been listening to the radio. Pop, her father, suddenly said we'll go through and see him land. Granny said she hadn’t done the dishes and Pop said "blow the dishes." They got there from Little River just in time to see the plane land. Mum's elder brother Charley climbed up the steps and looked inside. Mum touched the fuselage. "I wish I'd gone up those steps." She was there at the beginning of a new era.
She was fleet-footed, winning the hundred-yard married women's race at Little River sports meetings year after year. The same agility would see her on the farm racing across the paddock to head off a breaking flock of lambs. Dick said she was as good as his best heading dog. During the war-years she made all her, my brother Doug’s and my clothes as well as knitting khaki mittens, balaclavas, socks and scarves for the troops. She was always gardening, even right up until recently.
Now she is frail and bent. But I recall radiance and exuberance at the farm at the top of Okuti, a valley off Little River in Banks Peninsula, In 1947 she and Dick moved there. Leaving the township, the road skirted across the head of Lake Forsyth before turning up the valley, past the school and tennis courts, crisscrossing the bush-covered creek several times until it reached our cattle-stop. The gradient then steepened as it wound past our cattle-yards and the old bullock wagon - a rusting relic of pioneering days - before bursting out at the top of a ridge in front of our house. The farm was at the head of the valley. It was a place of country silence, though the rooster's call heralded every morning. Valleys, like islands, form a unity. This one provided shelter and challenge. Years later when I studied Wordsworth’s poetry and read what he claimed about the healing power of Nature his ideas made sense - Okuti.
The farm was run-down, over-grown with primary manuka and kanuka, the fences dilapidated, the yards in need of repair, the house in need of paint and maintenance. Part of the condition of the rehab loan was that the house be painted. Two painters from Christchurch moved in with us soon after we shifted. Dick and Mum fretted while they burnt off - frightened their blowtorches would leave a smouldering spark in the tinder-dry weatherboards. Crotchety men they didn't want two kids underfoot or playing near their ladders. Turning their blowtorch around they'd shout "Get to hell out of here or I'll burn you to a cinder". We'd scramble but not for long - their activities were too fascinating. One lit his hand-rolled cigarettes from the burner. Then an old mouse nest did catch fire. "Hey kid, get the hose here quick." I obliged. He was running round in small circles when Mum quickly arrived to assist me with the hose. She put the blaze out. The house survived. "Townies" she muttered as she went back inside.
Money was extremely short. In Dick's words we "lived on the smell of a oily rag'. Her labour was an essential component in those early days on the farm. She loved being out with him, active duty I think it could be called, a soldier’s terminology for it was a form of combat. Young as I was I sensed her blossoming. She looked after Dick's hearty appetite, tended her sons, did the washing - copper and tub at first - and housework, fed the lambs and the occasional calf, took care of the chooks, made butter and provided coherence and comfort to our lives. Her farm-work was interrupted by two pregnancies, twin boys, and then thirteen months later another son. The three youngsters bound her more to the house. Often I was called to hang nappies on the line, jiggle a child to stop him crying, burp up wind or rock to sleep. Trying to get a small child to eat mashed up vegetables proved challenging. They would watch with interest as I ate a spoonful (an experience that has put me off spinach for life), and then present me a tightly closed mouth and shaking head. Pups and piglets just tucked in; obviously human babies needed teaching or maybe the food tasted nasty. "Just get on and feed them," Mum would say when I raised such questions.