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I gradually made progress towards achieving my ambition.
Dave arrived every day to do odd jobs and take the cream out to the corner for collection, about a mile away. The cream was transported in a light flat-topped cart to which Mary was harnessed.
The day arrived when I was allowed to drive the cart, doing odd, unimportant little jobs. I soon became accustomed to it and enjoyed it immensely. A new and exciting experience for me.
Then I was allowed to ride Mary back to her paddock. She knew where she was going and would just manage to break into a canter before we reached the gateway, where she would stop abruptly. No stick! Great stuff!
On occasions Dave would have been using Moke as well, and I would take the two horses together. These were the only occasions when Moke showed any enthusiasm. I would let Moke go at the yard and ride Mary. Then they would both race, hell for leather, to the paddock where they barely managed to stop at the gate.
After demonstrating my ability in this way I was allowed to take the cream to the corner. The neighbours were related to the Smiths in some way and were well aware of the hardships I was enduring, and of the Smith’s eccentricities.
I would arrive there about 10.00am, not yet having had breakfast.
They were kindness itself. Jack D was a big, quietly-spoken man, his wife was jovial and vivacious and there were four boys.
Mrs D would sometimes invite me in for a meal alongside a warm fire and I would enjoy, for a few minutes, the comforts of home. I remember one day being invited in on a cold, wet day. They were all sitting around the warm fire and the boys were all knitting. Such peace.
Phil was an expert horseman. At times he used to ride a lively brown pony without the benefit of saddle or bridle, and just a rope around the pony’s neck.
§
Floods, from which the neighbours suffered badly, were frequent. On those occasions all their flat land would be under water and Swamp Road completely inundated.
It was in those early years that one of my ambitions was born — to Drain The Swamp — and it gives me great pleasure in the 1970s to see the flats in good grass.
In those early days the only grass that could survive the conditions was Paspalum, and frequently it didn’t grow until November. That and Swamp Grass had to suffice. I’m sure that the farmers of those days would be delighted by the improvements that have been made. Conditions on the swamp are still far from ideal but a great improvement has been effected and the foundations laid for further developments in the future. Today’s farmers complain — they always have and probably always will — but I wish they had the ability to look back and see the Hikurangi Swamp as I knew it in 1930. If they could, perhaps they could understand the men and women who went before them and achieved and suffered so much.
§
One day Miss S., who had been making lunch, asked me if I would call out to The Prof and tell him that lunch was ready. I yelled “Mr Smith!” several times in as loud a voice as I could muster, but without result. As my family will verify I can produce a tremendously loud whistle by using two fingers in my mouth, so I gave the Prof a couple of blasts, but this still produced no reaction from him.
The reaction from Miss S. was instantaneous, however. “You must not do that! You’re not calling a dog! What do you think you’re doing?”
“Sorry, I didn’t know”, I said, confused and squashed.
“When you call someone you must Cooee like this.”
The sound she then produced was quite remarkable. It started with a medium high note, descended to a lower pitch and then rose to a piercing shriek, accompanied by a rapid fluttering of her tongue against the back of her teeth which produced what sounded like a million screeching “Rrrr’s”. The Professor responded instantly.
After a good deal of experiment I managed to produce a similar sound myself, but never Miss S’s volume or high pitch. I could only employ it at the Smiths, however, for anyone else would have thought I was round the bend.
§
Meals were tedious: porridge for breakfast and porridge for dinner. Irish stew, scones, bread-and-butter and eggs. Packet soup was a popular lunch. If Miss S. ventured beyond these specialties the results were usually disastrous. They had obviously been accustomed to having their meals prepared for them.
Evidence of their former life-style was made apparent one day when Miss S. and I went looking for something in one of the cottage’s three rooms. This room had a separate entrance from outside, with no connection to the rest of the cottage. In it was stored a very large quantity of what looked like very expensive furniture. The cottage wasn’t very old but it had taken on the appearance of an uncared-for outbuilding. Its design was most peculiar and I can only assume that more was to have been added at a later date, which didn’t eventuate. It was a rectangular building equally divided into three rooms, only two of which inter-connected. Each room had an outside door. Other than the room in which the furniture was stored, one was used as a kitchen and wash-house and the other, the middle one, as a dining room.
The outside door from the dining room became very useful one day. Dad came to visit me on his motor-bike and stayed to lunch!
For some reason best known to the Smiths they didn’t eat with us: Dad and I were served our lunch in the dining room by Miss S., who was busy in the kitchen. Perhaps they were giving us an opportunity to talk.
Dad was an extremely fussy eater, as indeed I was until I arrived at the Smiths. The slightest thing would put him off his food, and his likes and dislikes, particularly his dislikes, were very well developed. I was interested to see how he would handle lunch.
Miss S. and the cottage were both rather grubby looking, which wasn’t a good start, and when Miss S. brought in the packet soup I knew Dad was in trouble.
He looked at me with a horrified expression when it was put in front of him. I knew he was too shy to say he didn’t like it, thank you, but I couldn’t imagine him eating it either.
As soon as Miss S’s back was turned the soup went out that door!
Miss S. must have been very surprised at how quickly he had disposed of it, and asked him if he’d like some more.
“No more, thank you,” said Dad, who was by then looking most relieved. With a great deal of reluctance he ate one slice of bread and jam and had a cup of tea.
Cliff later wrote that this isn’t entirely accurate: The soup Miss S. served wasn’t followed by bread and jam but by meat and veggies — and, to use his Dad’s words, “The meat were walkin’.” It followed the soup out the door and was rapidly disposed of by the waiting hens.
Dad’s memory would be unfailing in such matters.
He has, in 1979, at 82 years of age, the most efficient digestive system I have ever encountered. He now cooks for himself, Mum having been dead for years. He still eats at miners’ hours — breakfast at 6.00am, lunch at 11.00am and a cooked dinner at 3.00pm. This is followed, or used to be, by supper, which could consist of anything from porridge to pigs’ trotters.
On a recent visit to see him, I lifted the lid off his frying pan to see what was cooking for dinner that day. It was a mixed grill of two sausages, a piece of steak and two chops — all cooking together and well submerged in bubbling fat! He would eat all this, plus vegetables, at his 3.00pm dinner.
He never gets indigestion.
There must be a lesson in this somewhere. Perhaps it’s that you should never eat anything you don’t like. Dad certainly wouldn’t, not under any circumstances, nor would he use any piece of eating equipment that had been used by anyone else until it had been washed — not even a teaspoon! If a fly landed on his dinner, it was immediately tossed out.
§
The time had arrived for me to make a trip home, and it was looked forward to with great anticipation for I was to be allowed to take Mary and spend a night there.
I was going to show the Waro boys a good horse — and how proud I was going to be of that. There were several ponies in Waro and one a good one, ridden by Jimmy Newby, a roan and very lively. Although Mary was a light cart horse, she was willing enough and I reckoned she was fast. In any case I had a horse, which was really something — I could show off!
Dave caught Mary for me and everyone came out to the road to see me off. The cows had just left the bail and there was still much work to do, but this was to be my treat. Dave helped me onto Mary’s back and, having asked me to wait a minute, cut a nice switchy ti-tree stick which he handed to me.
“You might need this,” he said.
“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon.”
With that I gave Mary a good cut on the rump with the switch. She took off like a rocket, most indignant.
A switch was something to which she was unaccustomed and she was going to show me what she could do. She was going to show me that she was no Moke, that a switch was unnecessary and that a seven stone (45kg) rider was nothing to her.
I didn’t have a saddle, or even a sack to sit on. Only one of the thirteen farmers I worked for ever owned a saddle, and when eventually I did use one I disliked it intensely.
I made no attempt to pull Mary in. It was apparent that I couldn’t, in any case. The best I could do was hang on like grim death — with my knees and to the bridle and her long mane. I dislike, intensely, the cutting off of long manes and tails. A horse without them loses its character and wild appeal and becomes something of a human appendage.
Mary went like the wind, which fair whistled past my ears. It wasn’t going to take me long to get home. All went well along the first mile of clay road and then we struck the metal. Mary’s unshod hooves didn’t take kindly to that and I became concerned. I had been told to keep her off the metal. Mary solved the problem by veering off to the side of the road and hardly altered her pace.
Disaster came with the inevitable road-side drain. Mary stumbled and fell and for the first time in my life I saw stars, and not the ones in the sky!
It must have been some time later that I woke up. After gathering my scattered senses I found I was lying face up in the bottom of the ditch. Now what should I do? Mary was probably gone, but where? I wasn’t feeling too happy and all sorts of anxious thoughts flashed through my mind.
If I could find and catch Mary perhaps I could carry on as if nothing had happened. Otherwise, how embarrassing!
First I must climb out of the drain and find my pikau — a sugar bag tied in each bottom corner with the two ends of a rope, the middle of which is looped around the top of the bag. This is slung over the shoulders as a fair substitute for a suitcase.
The drain was covered in a fair tangle of blackberry and weeds. Mary, to my great relief, was grazing just a few yards from the drain — in fact I heard her munching grass before I had climbed out. Even more relief when she let me catch her without fuss. All I had to do now was find a way to get on her back.
By arranging her on a lower piece of ground and pointing her towards home I found this could be done, but before I could seat myself and grab the reins she was off — home — as fast as she could go. All my efforts to stop her were unavailing and in a matter of minutes we were back where we had started — in the cow-yard, where Mary awaited further instructions.
“What’re you doing here?” asked Dave, “I thought you’d be well on your way by now.”
This was, for me, a disaster of major proportions. How could I ever ride Creamy when I couldn’t even control Mary?
“Never mind, you’ll learn,” said Dave, when I’d explained what had happened. “We’ll have to give you Moke. You won’t have any trouble with him.”
We soon had Moke reined up and I started off again. But Dave was wrong about the trouble. I started off with a light switch to use on Moke. No-one was going to take any risks with me. But this switch Moke completely ignored except to give a slight flick of his tail when I hit him. He proceeded at a slow walk. When I got out of sight I broke off a much more substantial stick from a ti-tree bush and from then on there was a slight improvement in the pace.
it seemed to take me forever to get home and I became more and more frustrated and disheartened as time went by. My right arm was sore when we arrived. Moke was tethered to a rope on our back lawn. The grass was uncut and he was soon demonstrating his one great enthusiasm.
This wasn’t a horse to be proud of and my head had hung in shame as we progressed through the town. It wasn’t a successful visit.
§
I don’t know how much Mum and Dad believed me about my experiences on the farm. They could have been excused for not doing so. I’m not sure many people have ever believed me, unless they knew the Smiths.
But Mum and Dad both insisted that I give up the job and come home.
I was hooked on the horses however and wanted to stay. It is almost certain that Mum and I had our usual altercations. We were always arguing about something. No doubt I was a difficult child and perhaps they thought that being away from home would do me good. In any case they relented and said I could continue to work for the Smiths, but that I must ring Jim if I wanted to get back home.
Life must have been more peaceful without me — my recollection of times spent at home over those years is of continual arguments with my mother.
§
One wet day I was alone in the old house and made the best of it by doing some exploring. The Prof. and Miss S. must have been away somewhere. It was a three-bedroomed house, one each for Miss S., the Prof. and myself. It had a dining room and kitchen which were used on occasion and for no apparent reason apart from the fact that Miss S. liked a change.
Mine was a pleasant room with windows covering most of two walls and facing towards the bush. It had two reasonably comfortable single beds. Outside my window, and a few yards away, was the usual “House of Parliament”, built according to the pattern previously described. Miss S’s room I found to have a large double bed, a fire-place and an old-fashioned wash-stand with a huge crockery water jug and wash basin. The whole room was in a dreadful state of untidiness. The mantel piece was crammed with animal remedies of various kinds and, though I can’t remember it, there was probably a dressing-table also covered with litter.
The Prof’s room was much the same although he didn’t sport a fireplace or double bed.
The telephone was hung on the wall just outside my room and underneath it was a hole in the floor, with little channels cut in the floor leading to it, to facilitate the flow of water from a leaking roof.
Inevitably there was a call of nature. It was very wet outside and it would be most uncomfortable for me squatting in the ti-tree. I decided to use the House of Parliament outside my window. After making sure the coast was clear I donned my coat and took off through the back door, anticipating the joys of modern plumbing. To sit on a seat was something I hadn’t been able to do for some time. To sit on a seat and read the Auckland Weekly News in meditative mood had been one of my favourite pastimes.
But woe was me! The building was in a reasonable state of repair and the door opened without too much trouble, but inside was another matter.
There were cobwebs right to the door and no human had entered that building for many months. The seat was in one piece but the inevitable newspapers were faded and stained to a dark brown and the stink was such that emanates from something in the last stages of decay. The kerosene tin was rotten and what had been its contents had almost completely disintegrated and decayed across the floor.
For me , it was back to the ti-tree, but here was a mystery. Where did they go?
It remained a mystery until one day during milking Miss S asked me to fetch her an animal remedy for a sick cow. It was on the mantel piece in her room.
When I opened the door the mystery was solved. There in the middle of the floor was the biggest chamber pot I have ever seen. The pot was awe-inspiring in itself, but its contents were even more amazing. What had happened to its expected liquid contents only Miss S. could say, but the solids were manifest, heaped up, over-flowing, with, on the very top, draped across the summit, the biggest stool I am ever likely to see. You can (can you?) imagine the smell. I grabbed what I came for and took off. What other surprises would the Smiths produce?
§
Life went on in much the same way for weeks. At one stage milking was taking so long that the cows didn’t have sufficient time on pasture and their production was dropping. The Prof, in his inimitable way, produced an answer. We would bring in the cows twenty at a time, milk them, take them back out to the paddock and bring in the next twenty.
I regret that my memory cannot supply much detail of these milkings. I have always said I could write a book about the Smiths, but I have delayed too long. Details come back as I think and write.