Two Boys' Schooldays

What I’m about to embark on is a difficult write. It’s from memory, typed on a sheaf of papers loaned to me for a few days some forty years ago. I was particularly interested in the events because of the local history and the fact that daily, I look over the very place where it all took place. I can also see what’s left of the Otepopo Bush from my front door. In fact a few years ago, I helped the owner enrich the bush by planting some new plants. This story is confronting and not for the squeamish. It takes us back to sometime before 1861, about the time Charles Dickens was writing about the woes of society…

There was no bridge over the mighty Waitaki River and as a replacement for the ferryman, Jimmy-the-needle, who had drowned, Henry Wilson took on the job. He had two sons, Henry who was just six years old and Robert, who was eight. Wilson and his wife must have realised the importance of education, so decided to enrol their boys to one of the earliest boarding schools in the district, which was situated close to the Otepopo Bush. Wilson and his two boys made the arduous, horse and dray journey, taking them a full two days to reach the school.

Robert described the area accurately. The school was just the teacher’s house with a large room that was used as the classroom by day and a dormitory by night. There were up to thirty students, most of them locals, children of timber men working in the hills. The teacher’s accommodation was an attached room and the boys slept on top of grass-filled mattresses resting on the floor. Robert described the saddle hill to the east, the river to the south and the small creek that ran beside the school. The creek dried up during the summer, so water had to be fetched from the river by climbing down a steep, stoney bank. The Otepopo Bush extended down and south from the hill known as Mount Charles. It had been the site of a Maori battle.

The teacher was James Asher who at first was very good but he became frustrated when he was unable to stop his daughter from biting her fingernails. When all the quack remedies failed, he took a length of supplejack, a vine that has properties similar to cane, and gave her regular thrashings! The taste of blood must have been a stimulant to him for he began to thrash Henry and Robert! The beatings on their buttocks were regular and for no apparent reason, most of the time drawing blood! The boys dreaded the thought that they were going to be there for the whole year! But quite suddenly, Asher and his family left to be replaced by Mr. Robertson.

Mr. Robertson, a bachelor, arrived with house-parents, John and Mary. Robertson was a kind teacher, at first, that was until John was killed while pig hunting in the hills! There’s no record of the circumstances, but it seems John had kept a lid on Robertson’s violence and other vices! Soon after John’s death, the boys were subjected to regular, severe beatings with supplejack, and Robertson’s Sunday evening pastime was to climb naked into the boys’ bath, joining them to pick off the scabs from their backs, cased by his previous beatings!

Young Henry was required to share Robertson’s bed, and if he didn’t perform ‘unnatural acts’, he was threatened with being beheaded! Both boys were tied to Robertson’s bed naked and trashed with the supplejack until their blood flowed. Trips up into the bush for firewood would include threats from Robertson that he could murder them there and nobody would ever know or find them. The slightest perceived misdemeanour would result in punches to the head until the child was rendered unconscious.

Many times the boys planned to run away, but they were young and it was thirteen miles to Oamaru. They knew to get there, they would have to cross the Kakanui River, which would have been daunting! They didn’t dare attempt it. One day the length of supplejack went missing, which angered Robertson immensely and he blamed Robert! The pupils had named the cane, ‘Bogey’. Robertson treated to burn Robert with a candle to show him what hell would be like if he didn’t confess to the stealing of the cane! Robert was innocent so refused to confess and Bogey remained missing, so Robertson carried out his threat by holding Robert’s finger over a candle! The pain was intense and it took a long, long time to heal!

One day, Robert and Henry were sent into the bush to collect firewood and they hatched a plan to kill Robertson, but they realised they couldn’t do it, so instead they prayed together wishing Robertson would die! Whether Robertson found Bogey, or he cut a replacement, we don’t know, but he continued his thrashings and taking young Henry to his bed.

Robert and Henry’s prayers were finally answered when their father arrived at the school on the urgings of his wife. She felt sure something was wrong! Robertson was still in bed and he called the boys to warn them on fear of death that they should say nothing to their father. When Robertson was up and talking to Wilson, he tried to coax ‘his dear boys’ to sit on his knee! Instead they clung tightly to their father and asked go home.

While the horse and dray made its way to the top of the hill, the boys told their father about most of their ordeal. Robert showed his still-festering finger. Wilson stopped and turned the horse; he was going to give Robertson a good punching, but the boys begged him to head homeward, they didn’t want to go back! In Oamaru, Wilson called a doctor to attend to Robert’s finger, but on examination of the lad’s condition, he asserted that much longer at the school, Robert surely wouldn’t have survived! The doctor urged Wilson to take Robertson to court in Dunedin, but the boys’ father knew the logistics of travelling to Dunedin was beyond him, so instead they took an action at the magistrate’s court in Oamaru.

Robertson was fined the paltry sum of five pounds and was thrown out of the district! Hardly fitting punishment for his crimes! In later life Robert did well in public life and it was he who wrote those pages that so many years later, were lent to me.