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Dorothy thought that parts of this were in poor taste and unnecessary. You’ve been warned. ~Ian
Another farm labourer arrived. He was a boy from Auckland and much older than me, probably about sixteen. He was related to an elderly couple who owned a sheep and cattle farm next door — and also, he told me with pride, to the man who invented the fluorescent light. So he said.
The boy’s name, if I remember rightly, was Lloyd.
I can’t remember much about him. He wasn’t interested in horses, which reduced him in my estimation, and he seemed a bit scared around animals, which didn’t help either. He was a nervy type all round. With him I visited his Aunt and Uncle next door. They lived in a house just over the top of the hill, the roof just visible from the road.
Their shearing shed was built of split totara or kauri battens and was barely high enough to stand up in. There I first saw hand shearing and crutching, and hard, sweaty work it was too.
§
Dave Langridge from time to time killed a sheep for the Smiths, an operation which I watched with great interest. The sheep was hung in a tree overnight and cut up the next day, with Dave receiving a portion for his trouble. There was no refrigeration, of course, and keeping meat was a big problem. Sometimes it didn’t keep very well. It was reasonably safe if it was cooked after it went off, but if it went bad after it was cooked that was another matter.
After a particularly hard day, when everyone was dead tired, Miss S. said we could have dinner in bed. Lloyd and I got washed and into pyjamas, and we were snug in bed when Miss S came in with our dinner. I could smell it as she came in the door. It was mutton and it was rotten. Mine very quickly went out the window and there followed a considerable debate about Lloyd’s. Was it, or was it not, safe to eat? I said definitely not. Lloyd argued that he was starving and he would have to eat it — it couldn’t do much harm. While the debate proceeded I ate my vegetables, hoping I could ask for more. Lloyd ate his mutton. There were no more vegetables. During the night I woke to the ghastly sound of violent retching. Lloyd had his head out the window and his mutton was joining mine, along with his vegetables, plus his lunch and breakfast judging by the effort he was making. Still, he wasn’t hungry. He spent the following day in bed.
It must have been during Lloyd’s stay that there was a similar occurrence, almost certainly before that mutton dinner.
It was lunch time and the four of us were seated at the table for a meal of cold mutton and vegetables. I had taken a mouthful when I noticed an enormous maggot crawling along the side of my dinner plate. I nudged Lloyd and silently pointed to the maggot with my knife (one never mentioned these things, perhaps because we were afraid of offending). We both investigated our plates and found that there were maggots aplenty, all at least an inch long — almost mature you might say!
However the meat didn’t smell and we were hungry, so we gently nudged the maggots aside and tucked in. We watched the Smiths. They both used reading glasses and obviously couldn’t see the wild-life on their plates. Like us, but with less discrimination, they tucked in with great relish. On this occasion there were no ill effects.
§
I was better than Lloyd at almost everything on the farm and as he was much older this must have irked him, especially as I was not backward at showing off. I was becoming pretty good with the horses and had now got to the stage where I could control Mary. This was progress, but I was about to be taken down a peg or two.
I had been having trouble with my right knee (it lasted on and off for three or four years). On occasions, infrequently and unpredictably, when I bent my knee as far as it would go, something would click out of place and I could not then straighten it without great pain and difficulty. I had either to have someone grab my foot and pull my knee straight, or sit on the ground and somehow wrench it straight myself.
One day I was taking the cream to the corner in the light cart, with Mary in the shafts. I had loaded the Langridge’s cream on board and had just started off, standing casually in the cart, when something happened to scare Mary, who promptly bolted. I don’t know what caused it — I was taken completely by surprise — but I’ll never forget the ride she gave me. In a flash Mary was into a gallop, the cart bouncing all over the rough road. I crouched and bent my knees to avoid being thrown out and to get a purchase against the front of the cart with my feet so that I could rein Mary in. My knee clicked out and I was in real trouble, sprawled on the deck and grabbing desperately at the reins. Cream cans were flying all over the deck and every now and then one hit me as it cannoned against the sides of the cart. Once again Mary was beyond my control.
We were well past the corner cream stand before I managed to bring Mary to a standstill and survey the damage. I have forgotten how much cream I had lost — one doesn’t remember such things! I had taken a real battering from the cream cans and the sides of the cart and straightening my knee was real torture. So was the humiliation of fronting up again to the Smiths and Lloyd.
Another lesson about horses: like women, never take them for granted.
§
One wet Sunday afternoon Lloyd and I were in our bedroom passing away a leisure hour, reading, when we started to talk about all sorts of things — experiences, exploits, remarkable events in our brief lives. A brag session. I won’t use the language we used. We learned, and used, some disgusting expressions at school. Our conversation ranged far and wide with, no doubt, more than a little exaggeration. We showed off. We told dirty stories. I have heard some very dirty stories in my sixty-one years but none can surpass some of the filthy ones I still remember from my school days.
Telling yarns is a competitive activity, of course, and at that stage I don’t think either of us was a clear winner. We were beginning to run out of inspiration.
Then Lloyd said: “Have you got any spunk?”
I replied very hesitantly, for here I was on uncertain ground. “No, I don’t think so!”
“You’re a bit young, I suppose,” said Lloyd. “Have you ever had intercourse with a girl? I have!”
I was floored. I couldn’t compete with this. “No,” I said with wonder. (Could it beat riding horses?)
Lloyd then went into a vivid description of his experiences. This didn’t excite me greatly but I did find it extremely interesting and no doubt asked several questions such as who was she, how did you get the chance etc. Such things had never happened to me. I had been introduced to the pleasures of masturbation at an early age by my cousins, when we hid in the ti-tree and played “Doctors”. I have always regretted missing out on a Doctors session that included a girl, Mary, and created quite a stir when the participants were discovered. My cousins and I were not included in that group, although we lived in the locality. (Mary married at a very young age!)
“I’ll show you how to make spunk,” said Lloyd.
I was too speechless to reply. He had become quite excited in relating his experiences with the girl and in no time at all he was standing stark naked before me and displaying a penis which, although it was, I thought, of reasonable length, struck me as rather skinny! It was stiff and pointed almost directly at the ceiling but I had, I decided, seen better ones. There wasn’t a second’s delay. He grabbed a towel, laid it out on the bed and promptly mounted it. I had seen animals mating and knew the action. Lloyd attacked that towel like one possessed, and in a matter of seconds he was showing me his spunk.
The whole episode took about as long to act out as it has done for me to describe it. But one up for Lloyd, the premature ejaculator! I wasn’t going to compete with that.
My wife, who has just read this, takes exception to the foregoing, which she says is in poor taste and unnecessary, as was the Chamber Pot episode. And after all, she says, these people still have relatives living, and it is unkind to write of people this way. Perhaps she is right. Nevertheless, probably millions of boys have behaved in a similar manner and personally I hope they are not ashamed of doing so.
§
Let it be said that, in spite of their eccentricities, their tantrums, their difficult natures and the — after all, minor — hardships they made me endure, I loved the Smiths. They were made of the stuff that built the British Empire. In spite of what, for them, were tremendous difficulties, they carried on their farm work with the utmost dedication. They were going to be good, successful farmers and nothing was going to stop them. The fact that they rarely showed any signs of success didn’t deter them and they stuck it out and showed, in the process, a ton of guts. I know they loved me in return, were sorry when I left, and would have loved me to work for them again.
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It is five minutes past midnight on the 27th October 1979 and I wait for a phone call to announce that my youngest daughter, Lynne, has given birth, safely, to another child. My wife, who has spent the last two days at Lynne’s house giving her a helping hand, is resting in bed. Lynne was taken to the annex by Bill, her husband, at 3.00pm on the 26th. Nine hours have gone by and I pray that she hasn’t been in labour all that time.
It is time for contemplation. Of life, with its joys, its sorrows, its anxieties. Its intense pleasures and its gifts of peace and contentment and love. But to all of us there come periods of pain, suffering, fear, dread, horror, hatred, greed. The good and bad we share in unequal proportions. As we experience our allotted portion they leave their mark upon us and make us what we are. God is love, but many of us know nothing of God and little of love, peace and contentment. A happy environment produces happy people. Happiness is a state of mind: it can’t be bought and sold. We all possess it as a gift, but many of us don’t know it and so spend our lives striving for something we already have. Quite simply, we should count our blessings, enjoy what we have. And having found it, share it with others to get more.
A baby girl and both well. Born 12.30am on the 27th October 1979. Two hours of labour and the baby weighs 9lb 5oz — two ounces less than her mother. My tenth grandchild.
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The Prof. asked my father if he would build a cowshed for him, a request that Dad turned down, probably on the grounds that he was not a builder. I had probably told the Smiths that Dad had built our house, which he did soon after our arrival in New Zealand. When one considers that he had spent his whole life up till then working in Lancashire cotton mills and coal mines, he was game to have it on. It is a good house and he lives in it today.
At that time he was working on № 5 scheme, removing corners on the Marua Cutting with pick, shovel and wheelbarrow. This was an employment scheme subsidised (perhaps fully paid for) by the Government. One worked for three weeks for a pound a week and was then stood down for a week without pay. The foreman on the job was Joe Madden from Whangarei. Joe lived in a tent at the bottom of the Cutting. He wasn’t anxious about work and if it was a bit wet and cold would say, “Let’s go into the bush and light a fire.” The men didn’t consider one pound a week much of a wage and as far as possible provided only the equivalent amount of work. Joe himself probably earned only about twenty-two-and-six a week.
I remember Dad saying he’d put a flea in the ears of local farmers who complained about the slow progress as they passed by.
Dad is the most mild-mannered man I have ever known — until you cross him on a matter of principal. Then he’ll fight like a tiger, and the change in his character has to be seen to be believed. I once heard him tear a strip off a mine manager, his boss, and the fact that his job could have been at stake didn’t deter him. I listened with astonishment to this tirade, so unlike his usual behaviour. I think the mine manager was similarly astonished, and he accepted Dad’s proposition forthwith.
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According to Dad, I didn’t ever stay overnight when I visited them. Most often, it appears, I would ride a horse in as far as the blacksmith’s shop and leave it there to be shod, whilst I visited home. Dad’s 82-year-old memory is better than mine, for some things at any rate.
I remember arriving at Harry’s smithy with Mary one day with a request for new shoes. Harry’s horse shoes were made to measure on the job and were a certain neat fit. When they were beaten to the correct shape, and whilst still red-hot from the forge, they were burnt on to the horse’s foot, so a perfect shape for each animal was a certainty. I have spent ages watching Harry making shoes, and shoeing horses. Occasionally he would have huge draught horses to do. Harry would become very volatile when, tired of holding up their hoofs, they leant on him. There were others who would play up and fidget and fight their way around the blacksmith’s shop. The sweat would pour off Harry. It was a hard, hot and at times frustrating job.
On this particular day I asked Harry for new shoes for Mary. He looked at Mary and then at me, and said that on no account would Mary get new shoes from him but, seeing I had to ride her home, he would put “slippers” on her — for her sake and mine. Slippers are well-worn cast-offs that may still have a little life in them. The Smiths hadn’t been paying their bills — so Harry reluctantly shod Mary with these.
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Lloyd didn’t stay long. No one did. I held the endurance record for years with my eight months stay and I felt a little disappointed, years later, to hear that another boy had beaten me. However it must be acknowledged that he had some advantages. His family lived almost next door, in fact, and he was paid the princely sum of five pounds per week, which was quite an incentive in those days.