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My First Eighty Years

Chapter 5 — Waitohi Flat

page 88

Chapter 5
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 page 89 alotropic modification of oxygen.’ In spite of our dislike for this smart miss the laugh was against Miss Bathgate.

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.

page 90

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 page 91 hands on her grubby apron, came out to meet me. In answer to my question she told me that this was the chairman's place, but ‘himself’ was after taking the horse out. She pointed out the paddock where we should find him. ‘Chairman of the Committee!’ I could hardly believe it, but I talked as amiably as I could and told her that I was thinking of applying for the school. She asked my name and — long skirt and pinned-up hair notwithstanding — I could not bring myself to say ‘Miss’. I choked and said it was ‘Nelly Ostler’.

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 page 92 standards they ‘had their fill of comfort and would eat their enough every day’. Their farms were their own and no ‘rint collector at all’. What more could an Irishman ask? It was true that the women sometimes talked of a glorious future state when they should live in a house built of ‘wood itself’ and the floor of smooth boards and a ‘rale’ broom with a red handle, no less, ‘to sweep it with’. But what is life without a day-dream?

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 New Zealand Land Company. By arrangement, they were paid in land instead of money — so many acres for so much ploughing, clearing or gorse-setting. If the company imagined that as a side-line it was providing a convenient source of permanent farm labour it was mistaken in the Irish character. These people were too cautious to mortgage their land in order to build homes, and so be obliged to take work to pay the interest. They built their own houses out of their own soil with their own hands. As soon as the titles were granted, they settled. Some left wife and family at the barracks, but others brought them though no shelter was to be had except a dray, under the tilt of which the women and children slept, the men on the ground underneath it. We heard that there were families who simply slept in the shelter of toi toi and flax.

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 page 93 Waitohi they could hardly have realised four pounds, had they wished to sell. If, then, they had been ordinary, enlightened folk they would, in the beginning, have raised a mortgage, built good houses and farmed in style — until the depression came. Then, according to custom, the mortgagees would have foreclosed and they would have found themselves in the overstocked labour market. But, being only poor, ignorant, foolish peasants who knew no better, they were able to live in independence and what they considered comfort. I was told that when the good times came in the 'nineties and land rose to a higher value the caution of these peasants that had served them so well in adversity was not always proof against prosperity. Many of them sold and were not wise reinvestors. That merely means that they were no wiser than their contemporaries or than most of us.

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 page 94 use it for axle grease and ordered their wives not to sell; all the same, they sold it unknown to ‘himself’.

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 page 95 knew nothing. But it was not till two mounted policemen, with their sleek, glossy horses, tight, white breeches and shining accoutrements, rode along the highway and turned unhesitatingly through paddocks into the bush-filled valley that we knew the secret of the Flat. An illicit still had been raided by the police.

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 Dan Green, a disreputable old tippler, had shown the boys how to make poteen. The plant was rigged up on a quite extensive scale, and they had been turning out great quantities. The only trouble had been to find safe storage. They complained that they were obliged to sell it before it was matured and ‘the publican, the sly devil, would be offering a price not fit for a rat.’ All the spirits that had been found were now confiscated and Pat Cole, the only man discovered about the works, had been taken, but ‘by the mercy of God’ Dan Green had gone to town and had taken the worm with him. This was a great consolation. The fine that would be imposed would be paid from the sales of the poteen and there would be no trouble in starting again in a new retreat seeing that Dan Green and the worm were safe. The mystery that perplexed them all was how those mounted men knew exactly where to go and rode straight to the spot without a pause. Certainly someone must have informed. At that time fifty pounds was given for information that led to discovering an illicit still. Every brain on the Flat was working to solve the mystery but there was no suggestion of a solution. My mother remarked that it was just as well that we had not been in the know or we might have been suspected.

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 page 96 women were delighted when ‘Tim Troy dropped a fine keg, well doubled, in the gorse bush’. Yet working at the still was far from a drunken orgy. Very few took more than was good for them. It was a plain money-making concern, not lacking the spice of excitement. It is said of an Irishman that, finding himself in a new country, he asks, ‘Is there a Gov'mint? Then I'm agin it.’ This can be extended to, ‘Is there a law? Well, it's a poor fish I am and me not to contrive to break it.’

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.