From the Centre, page 7
As I grew older, also available to me at home were Reader’s Digest magazines and the books my parents took out from the London Book Club, which was a book lending club, not a discussion group. The books had orange (or pink) dust jackets covered in advertising, and I can remember being engrossed in The Kon-Tiki Expedition, books by Gerald Durrell, a biography of Louis Armstrong, Agatha Christie mysteries. I recall finding Cheaper by the Dozen hilarious.
I was ten when the poliomyelitis epidemic broke out in 1947 and schools were closed down for four months in the North Island. I was at my grandparents’ place for the summer holidays, which were now extended because of the outbreak. We received lessons by correspondence, though there always seemed to be more interesting things to do in Hongoeka, and I don’t remember completing any of the work. But I was disappointed at not going back to school in February, and also a little worried, after being without books for all of the holidays, that I might forget everything ever learned over this long summer break.
10.
THROUGH OUR CATHOLIC SCHOOLING, MANAGED AND controlled as it often was by engendering fear of sin, hell, the Almighty and the strap, we were given as good and as full an education as our teachers knew how. Repressive as it was, I wanted to be there, loved learning and having the textbooks in front of me. The nuns devoted themselves to our learning. No area of the curriculum was neglected.
We were instructed and drilled in the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic by the use of primers and textbooks. Apart from the readers, the texts, our catechisms and a number of booklets depicting the lives of Jesus, the saints and martyrs, there were no books for pleasurable reading — no class or school libraries that are features of today’s schools. What I looked forward to were the school journals, which were distributed to all schools by the Education Department four times a year, but which could be read at a sitting if we were allowed to turn pages. But, unfortunately, these were most often used for the teaching of reading, which meant the whole class keeping pace with the slowest readers as we read, aloud, a few sentences each, in turn.
Our spiritual and moral education comprised recitation of the catechism and the Ten Commandments, prayers and singing of hymns, the praying of the Angelus when the bell rang at midday. Stories told or read to us were of the saints and martyrs, or parables from the Bible, or they were of the suffering of Jesus as shown in paintings in our church, which we visited at least once a week. This sequence of pictures, the Stations of the Cross, depicted the agony, torture and death of the saviour. We enacted the parables. I was terrified I might be chosen to play a part — to be a beggar by the wayside, a washer of feet, a blind man, a distributor of loaves and fishes, but to my relief I never was. There were discussions of moral and ethical questions according to Catholic Doctrine. Every so often the missionaries would arrive in the parish to shout and storm about sin, hellfire and damnation. I didn’t like them at all.
Sister had instructed all the children that they should visit God in the church so that they would become holy. Visits got their sins forgiven — and all the marks and stains they had on their souls from fighting, forgetting, spitting, swearing, lying, being lazy, talking, laughing, playing with privates, bad manners, bad spelling and having bad companions could be cleaned off if you visited enough, and if you confessed. Your soul was a glowing white ball made of light that was inside your body seated at the base of your stomach. You had to keep it clean.
As well as visits you could store up prayers, genuflections, masses, offerings, blessings, communions, good thoughts and good deeds. If you collected enough by the time you died you could also get a good place in heaven, like a block of sky saved for you, and also it lessened the time that you needed to spend in purgatory getting your sins burned away.
The two girls crossed the playground, went up the church steps and into the porch. It was a little square porch and a good place to play Witchy in the Corner if there were enough of you, and if there was time.
— from ‘The Lamp’
Coming in from lunch break one day when I was in Standard Six, we found one of the blackboards completely covered in a chalked diagram. We were to be instructed on how babies were conceived, how and where they grew, and how they came into the world. The rather beautiful nursing nun, dressed all in white, who had come from Lewisham Hospital (owned and run by a Catholic order of nursing sisters, now Wakefield Hospital) talked as she travelled her pointer through the diagram.
The word ‘sex’ was never used or described, not on that occasion, nor at all, anywhere in my hearing in those days. Of course, we did have some half-baked knowledge of what it was that went on between men and women — something mysterious which was wrong and sinful prior to a wedding but right and good after the sacrament of marriage. What I appreciated at the time was that we were considered grown-up enough, at eleven or twelve, to have the unmentioned things explained, even if only to a degree. What I appreciate now was that any effort at all was made in 1949 to instruct us.
Miss O’Leary took us for physical education once a week. It was called ‘drill’. Drill it was, standing in perfect rows, star jumping, toe-touching, running on the spot, marching. It was the nuns themselves who took us for sports, namely basketball, tennis and, to a lesser degree, athletics. Sister Una taught us the basics of tennis, a sport that I took up when I went to secondary school. We caught a glimpse of her neck when her bib scrunched up while teaching us how to serve. This amused us.
Basketball — or more correctly, outdoor basketball — was a nine-a-side women’s sport, the forerunner of today’s seven-aside netball. Standard Five and Six girls joined basketball teams that played against other schools once a week. When I was in Standard Four, two Standard Six girls came to our classroom to select three ‘tall girls’ to make up the C team. I made myself as tall as I could and was delighted to be chosen. So, there I was in my first team, spending every break out on the court, impatient for Wednesdays to come around when we would play against other schools. The trouble was, I was a really sore loser. Losing gave me a headache, literally. I went home after the first loss and burst into tears. My parents didn’t have any sympathy, saying I’d have to get used to the idea of losing or give up playing.
Top left: At 10/11 years I was tall enough to make it in to my first outdoor basketball team. FAMILY ARCHIVES
In our senior years at primary school we were taken, during the summer months, to the Oriental Baths for swimming lessons, where we did distance certificates and, for some of us, life-saving certificates awarded by The Royal Life Saving Society ‘for practical knowledge of rescue, releasing oneself from the clutches of the drowning and for ability to render aid in resuscitating the apparently drowned’.
I DIDN’T SO MUCH MIND THE SINGING AND PRAYING THREE times a day, all part of daily routine along with fingernail and handkerchief checks. Nor was the fact it was forbidden to talk a hardship for me, because I didn’t want to talk anyway. Standing for long periods of time and the learning of Latin plain song and the singing of Mass were chores — good for the soul, we were told. It taught patience and fortitude. I came to like plain song later in life, just as I appreciate waiata tawhito now, with its unmetred, droning, free-flowing rhythms. Also part of daily routine were speech exercises and instructions for reading aloud — stand up straight, feet together, pause, stop, inflexion, voice production — all of which applied also to singing, which had the added practice of scales. All tolerable. However, I didn’t take too well to bathing and dressing dolls, darning, hemming and smocking, and all the things that were going to stand us in good stead when we became wives and mothers.
Thankfully I have never had to ‘release myself from the clutches of the drowning’, nor to ‘resuscitate the apparently drowned’. FAMILY ARCHIVES
Geography came in the form of being read stories of children from other countries that were pointed out on the world map on a wall of the classroom. One memorable piece of information was that the floors of Dutch kitchens were so clean you could eat your food off them. Despite what is said these days about Māori history not being taught in schools, there was an effort to do this, never forgotten by me because, to my deep embarrassment, Sister asked me in front of the whole class if I knew anything about Te Rauparaha. If I had known anything about this tupuna of mine it would have come from the history books of the time, which roundly vilified him and used many vile adjectives when describing him.
11.
THOUGH I ENJOYED SCHOOL AND MOST OF WHAT THE neighbourhood had to offer, Hongoeka Bay was always the safe place for me. It still is. It was a joy and a relief to be there, cared for by aunts, uncles, grandparents, grand-aunts and grand-uncles, some Māori, some Pākehā, all of whom interacted in many different ways with my brother, cousins and me.
Also, I believe it was the games we played there and the activities we were involved in that prepared me, sharpened me, toughened me for some aspects of the other worlds I lived in.
‘All Over’ was a game involving everyone, anyone who wanted (dared) to join in. It was played on our grandparents’ lawn, which was about the size of a tennis court, or sometimes on a paddock next door. It was a greatly upgraded version of Bullrush, involving boys and girls of all ages, with sometimes the uncles joining in. The ‘caller’ positioned her/himself about halfway down the lawn to one side, while all the runners assembled at one end. A name was called and the runner’s task was to make it to the other end, dodging, balking, sidestepping without being grabbed by the caller. The caller’s task was to tackle the runner and tag her/him three times on the back while all watched to see that this was properly done. To achieve this the runner had to be held and thumped three times on the back — not leg, not arm or anywhere else but on the back. The runner, when caught, would then try to flip on to their back, squirm out of the catcher’s grasp or attempt to fight a way out. If the runner made it to the other side it was All Over, everyone let loose, and the catchers would grab whoever they could on the way. Little children weren’t hurt, they were enfolded, tapped on the back three times and sidelined, where they could be a left-behind catcher if they wanted to. I was in this sidelined category for a few years, but as I grew older, being tackled, ankle-tapped, sent flying, being held, struggling and fighting to get free before the three strikes came down, ending up bruised and scraped, was like a graduation. This was the real world. Apart from washing ourselves in the sea, we ignored wounds, knowing there’d be little sympathy from adults.
Macky’s fingers were clamped to her ankle but he hadn’t got her yet. He hadn’t got her three times in the middle of the back and those were the rules. She kicked out with her free foot, but he wouldn’t let go, and now the other boys were sitting on her. Thumping One, taking their time for the show of it, Two, caught Three. Howzat?
— from ‘Kepa’
Another favourite game was Innings and Outings, often a competition between girls and boys. It was a kind of giant game of Hide and Seek where, if girls were ‘in’, we would stay in a certain place up on the hillsides while the boys ranged out into the bush. After we’d done the count, I think it was by ones to a hundred, we’d try to track them down. They could be in long grass, in ditches, up trees, their aim being to get to home base without being spotted by crawling through vegetation or circling around the hillside. No tagging was necessary. You only had to be spotted and called by name.
A favourite summer activity was bird nesting. There was strong competition between girls and boys to see who could collect not the largest number but the best variety of birds’ eggs. Boys and girls would roam through the bush in separate groups at nesting time. When we saw nest-building in progress — desirable ones — we’d mark the tree by way of laying claim to it. If the tree had already been marked, we’d move on. We did have our rules. We allowed ourselves to take one egg if there were more than two. It was our belief that an adult bird would not desert her nest if we took one and no more. Starlings’, blackbirds’ and thrushes’ eggs were easily obtained. Starlings in particular seemed to drop their eggs anywhere. What we sought most were the little, soft-lined nests of fantails, riroriro, tauhou and a variety of finches. There were no tūī or kererū here then. We were lucky enough to find a kingfisher egg once. It was in the creek, white and glowing, a real find for the girls’ team, but the boys matched that by securing a seagull egg. Though we knew of a magpie’s nest, those birds got the better of us, attacking whenever we came near. One of the boys made an attempt once, climbing a nīkau palm with a bucket over his head, but then he couldn’t see. The safest way for eggs to be carried down from the nests was in the mouth under the tongue! We would carefully make pinholes in each end of the egg and blow out the contents, a task made easy if the egg happened to be rotten. When this was done, we would add it to other eggs, threaded on cotton, and hang them in a loop on the bedroom wall.
Another thing we liked to do in the summer was to make bubble pipes. These were made from green karaka berries. We would cut a berry in half, dig out the poisonous kernel, and poke a hole in the side of the rounded half of husk with a small nail, giving us a bowl similar to that of a tobacco pipe. We would then search about in the long dry grass for a suitable piece of straw to fit into the hole we had made. We would scrape bits of laundry soap (Sunlight or Taniwha) into a tin with water in it, then blow through our pipes to make suds. From there we’d be able to blow bubbles onto the rim of the pipe bowl and wave them out into the air.
During the war years, we also collected ergot from rye grass. Though we didn’t understand this at the time, what we were collecting were seed heads that had been infected by a fungus, ergot. Ergot had some remarkable properties, among them the ability to stop bleeding. So what we children were able to do as part of the ‘war effort’ was help prevent wounded soldiers from losing too much blood. We spent many hours sitting in long grass, taking the seed heads, picking away the outer husks and putting the tiny seeds into tobacco tins. My cousins would take these to school, where they would be forwarded to wherever they had to go.
As a small child I spent many hours in the rock pools at low tide, trapping cockabullies and little slim black fish that I don’t think we had a name for. We’d each have a tin filled with water where we would put our fish. Or sometimes it was shrimps or crabs that interested us. When the tide started making its way in, we’d tip our catch back in the water and find something else to do. One afternoon I was out in the rock pools with a boy called Pat. Two Pākehā families from the Hutt Valley had built baches on my grandmother’s property. They were friends of the family but I don’t know the circumstances of how that came to be. Older children were along at the lagoon, and it was only Pat and I out on the large expanse of low-tide rocks. Pat was keen to be the first to fill his tin with fish — and he had almost done it when it overturned and all his fish fell into the water. He turned his pinkish, freckled face to the sky and yelled at the top of his voice, ‘Bugger you, God, you tipped out all my fish.’ I was both horrified and filled with admiration. We all knew about swearing from some of the uncles but weren’t allowed to do it; as for blaspheming, I understood that to be punishable by hellfire. However, my companion wasn’t struck down as he set about attempting to retrieve his fish. I met Pat a few years ago when he came to my cousin’s tangihanga. He remembered fishing in the rock pools and all the things we kids did together, but though it had made such a great impression on me, he didn’t recall spilling his fish and sending up his curses.
There were several methods we had for catching herrings. The most common way was by use of a particular kind of pickle jar that had a wide top and tapered to a small base from about a third of the way down. We would put a small amount of wet, crumpled bread in the bottom of one of these, tie a piece of string around the neck, secure a short stick on the other end of the string for a float, take the jar a few metres out into the water and set it, laying the jar on its side. (I still have such a jar with its string and float attached. We use it when we go on beach picnics.) The herrings would enter the jar and be trapped, unable to turn around in the narrow base. Sometimes there’d be four or five caught in one jar. These would be used for bait by anyone going fishing, or taken home for cat food. We didn’t eat them ourselves. Perhaps we were too well supplied with other larger fish.
Another way of catching herrings was to use fishing lines with the smallest of barbed hooks attached and sinkers removed. This could be done from a dinghy just offshore, or just by wading the line out a little way. Bread could be floated on the water to attract the fish. Probably the most innovative way to get herrings was by use of a spring of the kind found in the old discarded settees of the time. Bread was put out on to the water to attract the herrings and, when the feeding frenzy began, the spring wielder — standing as close as possible in the water or on a nearby rock — would cast the spring down into the swarming fish with a swift, hard movement. The swarm would break and the fish would scatter, but several would be left behind, stunned, floating on the surface from where they could be gathered.
Whitebaiting required different skills and different equipment. One type of whitebait net could be made from an old lock-knit petticoat. The top part of the petticoat would be tied in a knot. The hem of the petticoat would be pinned or attached in some way around the circumference of a circle of number eight wire. This net would be held in a narrow part of the creek while two or three kids went upstream and, one behind the other, swished from bank to bank with sticks as they walked forward, guiding the fish towards the net. This was called shoo-shy. I’ve never heard the term used anywhere else but here. The other type of net used, but illicitly, was pillow cases, also effective for netting. We’d make whitebait fritters on a pan, or in a billy over an open fire out at the wood pile. As kids we made fry bread out there too, all that sizzling fat, the squares of dough floating and ballooning, waiting to have golden syrup dripped over them.
