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I’ve renamed Cliff’s first employers the Smiths because that’s the most common New Zealand surname. ~ Ian
Anyone who could get you a job during the Great Depression was doing you a big favour, and when Nellie found one for me I was properly grateful. Nellie, so it was said, would be wealthy when she reached the age of twenty-one and received her inheritance. A nineteen year old orphan, she worked for the Farmer’s Trading Company in Hikurangi, which was then managed by Mark Edgar. At the time she impressed me as a plain girl who perhaps hadn’t had much fun in life, but for all that was cheerful, efficient and helpful, and with a heart of gold. She had helped me hold down my Saturday morning job at The Farmers sweeping floors and weighing potatoes, wheat, maize and so on — jobs I was least likely to make a mess of.
When she asked me if I would like a farm job I probably said I would have to ask Mum. Mum must have said “yes”, no doubt after a good deal of pressure from me. I have no doubt that I was extremely unpleasant and that Mum’s “yes” was an answer of desperation.
Mum and I had a love-hate relationship. She could love me, spoil me, mother me — or abuse, scold, condemn or belt me — in turn, and frequently, all on the same day.
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An arrangement was made for Mr and Mrs Smith, my new employers, to come and pick me up at home in their car.
A ride in a car was an event in itself in those days. As the Smiths couldn’t drive, Mrs Langridge, a neighbour, drove for them. She and Mum became friends through the Women’s Institute and remained so for the rest of their lives.
The Smiths had lunch with us. I remember becoming aware of their correct manner of speech and impeccable table manners. I had always been encouraged to speak well and have good manners, but theirs were something else, and beyond my experience. It made me feel that I should say, with my British working class background, “Yes Sir! No Sir!”
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Cliff’s father John was a coal miner. He’d built the first part of their house on Carters’ Road, Hikurangi, then dragged it by horse and sledge down to a section on King Street opposite The Rocks — what’s now called the Waro Limestone Reserve. The house was added to over the years. It’s still there, looking very sad. His Dad would have been mortified.
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The Smiths were correctly, and perhaps expensively, dressed, in clothes which were by then a little shabby.
Mr Smith was a small, peppery, authoritarian looking man, with ginger hair and moustache flecked with grey. His words were deliberate and emphatically correct, and each well-turned phrase seemed to be emphasised by a constant raising and lowering of his head. Perhaps this was a lecturer’s stance, for later I was to discover that he was a Professor of English. The local gossip had it that he had once been Headmaster of Auckland Grammar School and that his most recent employment had been running a private boarding school in Dannevirke.
I don’t know the origins of the word “eccentric” but it must have been coined to describe people like the Smiths. Legends grew around them, often true.
They were remarkably alike. Mrs Smith’s shoulder-length hair, like his, was ginger and flecked with grey. She had the same preciseness of speech and the same faint Yorkshire accent. She was obviously a woman accustomed to getting her own way, and one, I soon discovered, who would fight bitterly to get it if and when necessary.
Both were entirely assured and confident, particularly with the likes of us.
After weeks of addressing her as “Mrs Smith” I discovered, to my embarrassment that she was, indeed, the Professor’s sister! Why she never enlightened me I’ll never know, but perhaps she simply liked it, for they lived together very amicably and I can’t recall any serious differences of opinion between them. Anyway, Mrs Smith became Miss Smith.
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The Smith’s car was, I think, a Buick, with the old canvas hood and side screens made of canvas and celluloid slung over a metal frame. It was equipped, of course, with outside mud-guards and running boards and a spare wheel strapped to the rear. It had no self-starter, and it was an interesting sight to see Mrs Langridge crank it. First, four turns of the crank handle to prime it, then a good heave to get it going. If it fired first time you were lucky, and of course one had to remember to retard the spark to avoid a backfire, which could have serious consequences for one’s hand or wrist.
I remember Mrs L as a big woman and I’m sure I’m right when I say that each time she pulled the crank the front of the car lifted six inches. She was very competent, however, and soon had us on our way.
We stopped at The Farmers, picked up the groceries and thanked Nellie for her services. This, plus other stops, including no doubt the Dairy Company, and I was on my way to my first permanent job.
Ours wasn’t a fast journey. Thirty miles per hour would have been our limit — indeed the roads wouldn’t have allowed a greater speed — although I remember Mrs Langridge’s son Dave telling me how someone of his acquaintance had reached the incredible speed of 45 mph! The last mile or so was over a clay road.
It was in June 1931 that I arrived at the Smiths’ farm, and I was to celebrate my thirteenth birthday there on the 5th of July.
We arrived in time to have one of Miss Smith’s scones and a cup of tea before milking.
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My total experience of farming had been watching my Uncle Jack milk the two cows, sometimes three, which he ran on five acres up Carters Road in Hikurangi. He would separate the milk with his tiny separator, and one of my cousins would deliver the cream in a billy to Simon Teasdale’s stand on the main road opposite the northern end of the Lime Rocks at Waro.
In the Smiths’ cow-shed everything was hustle and bustle, and we were soon milking. Or rather the Smiths were. I tried to be useful, bailing up cows and washing their teats with a rag and a bucket of water. I say teats, but everyone, universally, throughout my farming life, called them tits.
The washing water needed constant changing for it soon looked more like muck than water. My washing wasn’t entirely efficient and neither was anything else I did, so I was soon instructed in how and why and what to do — a barrage of instructions that seemed never-ending.
§
Memory is strange. Some of the things I remember most vividly are the unchanging verities of every day. Others are mere incidents. Even on my first working day it soon became apparent that some things would wait for no man and that my bowels must move, and fairly urgently. But where? And how should a shy, working class boy, sensitive to his social position, put the necessary question to such cultured and well-mannered people?
I certainly couldn’t ask him where the dunny was. I was sure he wouldn’t know the word “dunny”. Or “dike”. I wasn’t even sure of “out-house”. I knew “lavatory”, but we didn’t use that word at home and it never occurred to me at the time.
With the situation becoming urgent, I decide on a little humour.
“Mr Smith,” I ask. “Please Sir, could you tell me where the House of Parliament is?”
“I beg your pardon?” asks the Professor.
“I want to go, Sir. Would you please tell me where the House of Parliament is? We call it that sometimes at home.” This with a grin, since it’s funny.
“Oh, I see! I think I understand,” says the Professor. “Come over here.” And he walks me to the rear of the cow-yard.
“Do you see that track going down and over the gully and up through the ti-tree? It leads to the piggery. If you follow that track you will find the toilet the men use just to the right of it. You may use that toilet.”
“Yes Sir. Thank you Sir!” and away I race — down the hill, across the gully and along the track that led up through the ti-tree towards the piggery.
It was as far as it sounds and it soon became clear that the “men” had considered this a wasted journey. Still, there it was, safely out of sight. The Prof may have called it a toilet but it was a dunny alright, one and a half sheets of corrugated iron forming each of three sides, and the roof, and the same for the door. But the timber holding the iron together had almost entirely disintegrated, and fern and grass had grown to a great height around it and blocked the door. My desperate efforts to open the door almost destroyed the building, but I managed to get it open far enough to look in.
Through a mass of spiders’ webs I could see the remains of the standard board seat with its hole and, underneath it, the rotted remains of a kerosene tin with its decomposed contents spilled over the equally rotten floor.
Not a sign of the essential piece of newspaper either. Grass would have to do, and the shelter of the ti-tree. That was to be my “toilet” for the next eight months, although, whenever possible, I substituted paper for grass. There were compensations. In those days one was never far away from ti-tree. Grass was scarce on occasions, however, and one had to be careful to substitute something suitable. I once used dock leaves, which was a very painful experience, and years later, in Europe, I ran foul of stinging nettles.
§
I soon found I wasn’t suitably equipped for the job. The Smiths had gumboots, a recent innovation, but I only had my leather school boots, which were totally inadequate. The concrete yard was big enough to accommodate twelve or fifteen cows. The balance were held outside on metal covered with eighteen inches of what could best be described as a soup of mud and liquefied cow dung. From time to time more cows had to be driven forward onto the concrete and, at the end of milking, milk had to be carried in buckets across this stinking mess to feed the calves. Very soon I had muck up to my knees, with generous amounts splattered on my short pants. I was only a little fellow, about five feet nothing, and couldn’t do my job without getting quite covered in muck.
The next day the Smiths did their best for me by providing me with some of the Professor’s leather spats, but this really only meant that I had more to wash at the end of the milking.
For a long time my feet were dry and clean only when I was in bed. Later, after a trip home, Mum bought me some gumboots, which cost about nineteen shillings, a strain on our finances. My wages were seven shillings and sixpence a week and found (wages and my food and shelter).
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The Smiths had owned the farm for many years, but run it from a distance through a series of managers. It was their hobby, and they had spent their holidays there. They had a good deal of money, which they lavished on gadgets and machinery of all sorts — all the latest ideas and gadgets, generally inappropriate, and all discarded as soon as some boffin thought up something else. The brave new methods and equipment rarely worked in the Jordan Valley and their debris littered the property, enough to drive any farm manager mad and off the farm to join the stream who had failed to produce the perfection demanded by the Smiths.
On retirement the Smiths moved to the farm and, although they built a manager’s cottage, they could never persuade one to stay. It was bad enough being employed from a distance.
Miss Smith had spent a few months at Ruakura Research Station, working on the Dairy Unit. Ruakura was the fountain-head of all the new-fangled ideas, generally inappropriate and often quite stupid in our circumstances, in whose name we suffered. But I came to believe this only later. At the time I thought they knew it all!
With just their farm income, and with their eccentric ways, it wasn’t long before their savings were depleted and it was in this impoverished state that I found them. The way they lived and worked was quite incredible, although I had no idea quite how incredible.
I was quite ignorant of farm work and farm life. It was my first full-time job and I was a townie. I’d been told often enough that work on farms was hard, and if this was work then I must put up with it.
I was too young and inexperienced to know I was being exploited. Anyway I was pig-headed, stubborn and, I’ve come to understand, a little sadistic. My parents had no idea of my working conditions and, if I had told them, probably wouldn’t have believed me. Indeed, unless they knew the Smiths, no-one else would either.
And finally my family was desperately hard up and I wanted to contribute. Dad was on the dole, for which he had to work. His pay was One Pound ($2.00) a week for three weeks and, for the fourth week, no work and no pay. I was lucky. Most of my age-group, and in fact most men, were unemployed in Hikurangi, and it was only on rare occasions that jobs were advertised in the daily papers. I had my name down for a job at the Post Office which I got five years later — after thirteen farm jobs and one or two spells in coal mines etc.
There was another reason for enduring the Smiths, however. I had a passion for horses and at that time entertained all sorts of romantic ideas about them. The Smiths owned Creamy, the most beautiful pony I had ever seen. It was my ambition to ride him.