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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 11, Issue 11 (February 1, 1937)

A Rural Vignette — Or The Forgotten Branch Line

page i

A Rural Vignette
Or The Forgotten Branch Line
.

(W. W. Stewart collection). The Wairarapa Mail Train passing the rail car at Kaitoke Station, North Island, New Zealand.

(W. W. Stewart collection).
The Wairarapa Mail Train passing the rail car at Kaitoke Station, North Island, New Zealand.

The willows will be changing now from red to green, in the bends of the river. They glowed so warmly beneath the clay banks and the jumble of broken limestone cliffs. All the winter the willows flamed as if the burnished husks that imprisoned the green tip of the Spring were polished till they caught light from the wind and rain. The husks knotted the feeble twigs and gave the trees a burning warmth beside the icy river, until one day, they were no longer red, but green with gossamer lightness.

I remember those willows with affection, and the smoke that came up through them as the afternoon sun dipped early down behind the hills, and with the smoke the friendly chugging sound that filled all the lonely valley with a sound like home.

Late winter or early spring is a sharp time to take to the road, but it is a good time. Southward through a gap of the hills that edge the Canterbury Plains a little railway line goes on from the branch line town of Waimate. It was laid down in the hearty and optimistic ‘eighties, but now it keeps to its quiet way, holding occasional and conversational intercourse with the slow stream and the road through the gorge, until it runs into the wider atmosphere of the twin basins of the Waihao Forks and Wai-hao Downs.

It is no longer a passenger line, but when as a goods train, it goes out, the surprising thing is how it draws its own peculiar life towards its quiet terminals. Waihao Forks and Waihao Downs are two stations, though almost one in thought and mood. A willow filled gully and a short fertile stretch keep them one and a half miles apart. When the train whistles at one you can hear it at the other. Yet they are sufficiently distinctive to be each a little focal point of a valley's life. At Waihao Forks a stream joins a good trout river. The hotel hobnobs with the station. The cattle pens are opposite the Post Office, but the Post Office is simply a box at a roadside cottage door. Waihao Downs, further on, is buried in the low hills. It has the homestead, the store, the station sheds and workmen's houses, and it has the blacksmith.

The blacksmith is important. He has a proprietary air towards the station buildings. On the days in the week when no train runs, or when there is no official at the station, he keeps the key of the sheds. He knows his man. He is a chronicle of the country's doings. I see him now smoking his pipe, his hair like Esau's, curly in his neck, his slit leather apron polished with wear, his eyes rarely moving with the slow mechanism of his thought.

Near the wide doorway and behind the tethered horse the wooden slabs of the walls of his shop were covered with the burned marks of sheep brands. The Waihao is good sheep country. Horseshoes piled the floor; links of chain were buried in the dust; the windows were curtained with cobwebs; the tongs were ready in front of the forge. As the smith leans on the arm-lever that works the old-fashioned bellows he peoples the countryside with his talk. Not that he goes often beyond his “shop.” News comes to him at the railhead. But when the train whistles the bellows hang idle. The forge is abandoned. The train, indeed, is a magnet drawing to it not only the township's desultory workers and the idlers from the store, but all the slow quiet industry of the soil.

I had a fancy once to put this country in a book, and so I started making

(Continued on page iv.).

(Photo., R. W. Carr). The Railway Station at Dunedin, South Island, New Zealand.

(Photo., R. W. Carr).
The Railway Station at Dunedin, South Island, New Zealand.

page iipage iiipage iv
(Rly. Publicity photo.) A recent view of Nelson, South Island, New Zealand.

(Rly. Publicity photo.)
A recent view of Nelson, South Island, New Zealand.

ing friends with it. A casual motorcar acquaintance will not do, because from the enclosed luxury of a car, the landscape, lonely and lovely with the wide swept symmetry of purpling mountains, the green downs and the yellow cliffs where the river runs, is yet awesome in its immensity—majestically impersonal. And so I came loitering along the road by cycle and by foot, watching the slow detail of growing life, and that was how I found the little driblets of traffic flowing to the railhead. It was a slow gait, this traffic.

The cowboy's boots are white with mud that has gone the colour of dust. He walks with a footsore tread as if the soles of his boots had never bent with the pressure of an easy step. He clops along in the wake of the cattles rolling flanks. The cumbersome beasts watch the road, and he is silent too, and shy as a calf.

When the “WW” on the Wellington Workshops train went wrong. (Sketch by W. London.)

When the “WW” on the Wellington Workshops train went wrong. (Sketch by W. London.)

The shepherd brings his sheep down by slow stages, six or seven miles a day from the back country. The dogs pad across the road and back again.

You know the slow way countrymen talk, chewing on their thought as on the soft end of a stem of grass.

I remarked on the day. The country was washed and warm. A lark trembled over the hill.

“I could envy you your life,” I said, “walking like this through the countryside.”

He looked at me and then at the sky. “And what would you do when it rained?”

I looked at his boots. Like the cowboy's, they were also white, but with dust that had caked to mud.

And thus I passed on all the day, talking to the roadman, the ploughman, the post mistress, and hailed the passing trolleymen rolling along the rails like oarsmen in rhythmical motion. But at that hour when the sun dips and the ground fogs begin to creep eerily over the ploughed paddocks, and a homeward craving, a stomach craving besets one, the chain of my cycle rode the sprocket; the old machine baulked and tipped me down with aching legs and mind a little sated with the sweet alure of country joys. I had lingered too long at Waihao Downs. I was now at the Forks and far from home.

Was ever sound more musical then than the whistle of an engine, or an engine's chug-chug, or sight more blessed than engine smoke coming out of willow trees, red willows turning green. A train is a grand thing in that it always links a strange land with the promise of home.

The smell of the cattle and sheep in the trucks was only warmly and inoffensively odorous during the leisurely unconcern of that branch line loading. A guard's van is a homely place and gangers are good company, for if the blacksmith had the gossip, they had all the blacksmiths' gossip and more. In the mind of the guard, too, the slightly aloof consideration of the guard, the prosperity of the countryside is interpreted in the figures he holds in his hand. He pushes his hat back to scratch his forehead the more easily to make the calculations on his lading sheet.

And thus it came to me, not by words, but by the spirit of the day, that the little train running Downwards and in again to the town, tapped the human and material heart of the country with complete understanding. The train belonged. It knew the sheep yield, the bushels to the acre. It knew the very soil.

page 33
mug. However, Watson tells me, his best efforts were during the Great War, when he kept count of the huge masses of prisoners reported in the communiques: “Four hundred thousand Russians taken by the Germans last Saturday, three hundred Russians taken prisoners by the Germans, two hundred thousand Austrians taken on Wednesday” and so on … Robbie reckoned that eventually “all the Germans would be prisoners in Russia and
“Johnston has an irritating habit of giving advice about dealing with slugs that attack dahlia leaves.”

“Johnston has an irritating habit of giving advice about dealing with slugs that attack dahlia leaves.”

all the Russians prisoners in Germany and they'd have to fight their way ‘Ome.’” Robbie has strong and picturesque views on economics and war, and upsets the Major terribly. He encountered the latter's strong claim that we should buy nothing but British goods by saying that trade went round and round the world and used as an illustration that when a dozen girls got engaged in a country town, the jewellers did well, but the drapers' trade in gloves fell to nothing. He also has a theory that no country ever grew to greatness unless it had a national drink, beer being the foundation of British greatness until leadership fell into the hands of the Scotch because of the superior merits of whisky. He ascribed the downfall of the Roman Empire and the scattering of the Jewish race to their lack of a distinctive beverage, and prophesied the certain dismemberment of the United States for the same reason. He based his assurance of a Russian victory over Germany on the superiority of vodka over Munich beer which he found tasted like bathwater.
(Rly. Publicity photo.) Day's Bay, a popular Wellington seaside resort.

(Rly. Publicity photo.) Day's Bay, a popular Wellington seaside resort.

Watson is the only adequate disputant with Robbie, and in many ways is even more picturesque. His money troubles provide our streets with breathless half hours. His radio is not back yet and it was taken away for repairs, he said, over three weeks ago. The Smith's ladyhelp, discussing with our maid, his inability to meet the current half year's second mortgage interest, said it was ridiculous to see him giving a law clerk beer in the back garden for the second time in one week. He is a crank on sprays. His garden shed is a laboratory of tins, bottles, and containers of lethal mixtures. He has a habit of singing “Down the Vale” while he is spraying, and Smith reckons that he is imagining he is dealing death and destruction to his creditors. Smith is a good sort, but has a wife who, in Johnston's words, “puts on the largest record in creation for the size gramophone she is.” She runs a continuous performance, too. They get very good reception of it without static for three houses each way. It has the steady remorseless persistence of our wireless set when the girls are at home. The ladyhelp told our maid that when Mrs. Smith was away last month, Smith was so lonely without the buzz of Mrs. Smith's insistent tones, that he took the radio set up to the bedroom and only switched it off just as he was dropping off to sleep. Johnston is an obliging sort, but he has an irritating habit of coming round on Sunday mornings and giving advice about the treatment of sweet peas, laborious methods of dealing with slugs that attack dahlia leaves, and other strenuous ways of improving the garden. He has a loud carrying voice which easily reaches the wife's ears, and gives her quite wrong ideas. He has the smallest model yapping toy Pom., a genuine miniature. Robbie pulled one of his best about this one, on one of his long benders. He had missed his own path and was trying to focus this tiny animal growth which was hopping here and there. Mrs. Johnston gathered her darling and Robbie said, trying still to really see it clearly, “Why, Mrshs Johns'on, you're prackertially outer dogsh, aren't you?”

I've missed out the retired Official Assignee who lives two doors from me, and is a mine of stories about the country province in which he officiated; the widow Martin who is rather a mystery, and many others who may appear later on. Robbie is completely out of Major Owen's list just now. He advanced the theory that all wars could be stopped by making the officers wear slop suits, and restricting military age to those over fifty. He reckons there'd be a business conference in No Man's Land in less than a week and the thing would be settled by splitting the difference. It seems sense, too.