Voyage Surprise

Voyage Surprise

Back in the day, Henry boarded the TEV Hinemoa one of the inter-island ferries that plied the Kaikoura coast and Cook Straight from Lyttleton to Wellington and vice versa. He had been selected for Ranger training and was journeying to Rotorua for an induction course which would change his life. He was travelling on his own, a young fella, barely past eighteen, breaking away from his comfort zone and the bosom of his mother.

His parents took him over to Lyttleton harbour to see him off. Without them he could have taken the train from the Christchurch railway station, an electric train that passed through the famous rail tunnel, or he could have caught the steamer-express that left Invercargill at the bottom of the island and chuffed its way up to Lyttleton where it unloaded passengers and freight onto the ferry. Mum wanted to make the journey over the Port Hills, because Henry was her youngest and the first to fly the nest. She, had a tear in her eye as Dad sung a few lines of the wartime song, ‘We don’t want to lose you, but we think you ought to go!’

Henry had a brand new, blue expanding suitcase, with his initials stuck on, transfers of gold lettering with a back borders, chosen by Mum. It was hefty and awkward for him to carry. Even though it was midsummer, Mum had made sure he had cosy clothing and four grey woollen blankets, each with his initials darned onto them with red wool. His ticket had his cabin number on it but the purser wasn’t very keen to shown him where it was, his attention was on the first class passengers. However, there were signs that showed him the way once he had figured them out, and he made his way to a double cabin in the bowels of the vessel, below the waterline he guessed, and near the bow. The government wasn’t spending up large on his travel costs!

He left his suitcase in the cabin, whoever it was bunking with him surely couldn’t get past the one-key-fits-all locks! He headed up to the deck to join the crowd watching the activity before cast-off. They were about forty minutes late because the train had been delayed at Ashburton and the loading of freight took extra time. Henry spotted his parents among the crowd and they waved from time to time. Finally the ship honked its foghorn and she backed away from the wharf, when in the open water of the harbour she turned and headed out towards the sea with the pilot’s launch steaming along behind. It was a still evening, the sun was down but there was a lingering twilight allowing him to see the hills that flanked the harbour. He could pick out the tussock grasses and from time to time he could see farmhouses with their twinkling lights.

The Hinemoa hove-to for the pilot to disembark and board his little launch for his return trip, and before long she passed through the Heads and they were in the open sea. A southerly had spring up so the ship was riding up and down the swells. It had become chilly, so Henry searched for somewhere warm up and perhaps buy something to satisfy his youthful need to eat. He couldn’t find anywhere that resembled a restaurant, although he’d never eaten at one on land either! And he’d never been into a bar. You weren’t allowed to booze until you were twenty one in those days.

There were smoking rooms, which Henry avoided, and he found a restaurant for first class passengers. The saloon sold pies, but he found the stewards, didn’t want to serve him because he wasn’t buying beer. The men buying beer seemed to have the knack of attracting their attention, which was by flashing a half-crown piece and giving them a wink. Henry had never encountered tipping before and he was damn sure he wasn’t going to start now! So he decided to out-patience the stewards, by watching them at work. They seemed pretty slip-shod and weren’t in a rush. They sold smaller bottles of beer and just opened the bottle, shoved it into an eight ounce glass, neck-first and handed it like that to the customer! Henry eventually had his pie, but it was as cold as charity and limp!  

Henry’s cabin mates were a mother and her young boy. Why the purser or whoever put them with a single bloke is one of those unsolvable mysteries. The boy was complaining of an upset stomach, and any wonder, they could hear the bow slicing through the waves, and feel the rising and plunging as she pounded through the swells! The stuffiness and heat from the engine room didn’t help either. Mum had packed a couple of sheets of brown paper for him, because his grandmother swore that black and blue that if you put brown paper next to your skin, on your belly, you won’t be seasick! He gave it to the mother and she put on the boy, and said she would like to use some too. It must have worked because they all slept soundly.

After the stuffiness of the cabin, the fresh morning air was invigorating for Henry when, bright and early he was up to watch as they passed through the heads of Port Nicholson on their way into Wellington. The sun was above the horizon, but would soon be blotted out by a bank of clouds. He watched the low, steepish hills pass by, they were dried by the summer’s sun and there were a few sheep grazing, ignoring the familiar ship as she slipped by. The ship turned for docking, giving Henry a good view of Petone, a suburb of Wellington. Once alongside there was all the activity of tying up and securing the vessel. Quite a crowd had gathered on the deck ready for disembarkation and they had their luggage with them, so Henry went down to collect his.

Strong and all as he was, Henry’s load was an awkward carry and the trek was long toward the bus station. He stopped to flex his shoulders and turned to watch four gaudily dressed young women with deep voices, as they walked along the wharf towards him. They wore high heeled shoes and he wondered vaguely how they managed to walk so sedately. As they came abreast of him, he did a double take, he recognised them! They were the stewards from the saloon aboard the Hinemoa! Dressed up like women, long hair, boobs and all! They were wearing nylon stockings with seams, perfectly straight, down the back! They were laughing and chatting like normal people!

Henry’s education was just beginning!

Maggie

Maggie

Times were tough in the twenties, even so, Fred had a hankering to own his own piece of land, a farm anywhere in Otago. Soon enough, he discovered a newspaper advertisement, a mortgagee sale of a block of land that had all but been abandoned. He like the idea of the river frontage. He never knew the full story, but a dam had been built across the river, and there were the abutments for a water wheel. Someone long ago had built a flourmill there. There were a couple of old sheds, and it appeared that the old flourmill had been pretty much destroyed by fire. He bought the land, a series of river flats that extended to the east to where there was a track down to a ford, which was known as known as Frame’s Crossing.

Fred lost his wife to tuberculosis when Maggie was just five, but he kept on working in the boot factory until she had finished her primary education. He bought the land at auction and even though he was the only bidder, it cost him three quarters of his savings. After moving onto the land, Father and daughter stayed in the best of the sheds until he and Maggie built a humble two-roomed cottage, which they would add to as time went on. There was no reticulated water, so it was Maggie’s job to carry it from the river, a steep, slippery climb, but she never complained. There was no electricity, which wasn’t a burden either because no other houses in the district had it yet. The ground was too stoney to dig a pit latrine so they used a kerosene tin for number twos and George emptied it into a little gut some hundred metres from the house.

It was a hard life but they got by. Fred picked up work in shearing sheds and on the threshing mills during grain harvest time. He trapped rabbits and sold the skins. Maggie was chief cook and bottle-washer, stretcher of rabbit skins, collector of firewood, she trapped eels, shot paradise ducks and the occasional wood pigeon, which was illegal, but she didn’t know. Fred went into the forest to cut fenceposts and scraped up enough cash to buy wire so he could fence the property and once that was done he bought some sheep. The grass was poor quality but gorse is quite nutritious, when it’s young and soft. To encourage young and soft growth, gorse has to be burnt – it’s the coppice-growth that’s palatable for livestock.

The northwest wind brings with it a low humidity and warmer temperatures, especially around the spring and autumn equinox, which is the best time to burning gorse and stimulate new, fresh grown. Old green gorse doesn’t burn cleanly without low humidity and a gentle wind behind it. Moisture in the needles generates dense, brown smoke. Conditions were just right, so Fred went out to burn. But he didn’t come back once the smoke died down! Maggie found him! He was not burnt but somehow became trapped and it was the smoke that got him! Maggie was heartbroken and tried to keep her father’s dream alive, but it was too tough for her on her own, so she moved to the city.

Several times, she tried to sell the land, but there were never any takers. By 1960 the Forest Service had stepped up their planting programme and they needed a new headquarters site. They city big-noises wanted to abandon the use of an old farmhouse that was starting to fall down around their ears because they didn’t want to invest in the maintenance of it, despite its beautiful kauri and matai timber. So Maggie was approached and she sold forty acres. The Forest Service plan was to eventually build a forest village on the land, which never eventuated, but the new headquarters was ready for occupation in 1962.

The Forest Service were helpful to Maggie in that they carried out the land survey and erected new rabbit-proof fences, all done honestly and to the letter, but they never took Maggie to see on the ground what she had sold, and what she had left. They provided her with plans and explanations in the office, but she didn’t understand any of it. She wanted to sell the rest of the land, for holiday homes with river frontages, but she really had no clue as to what was her land and what wasn’t. The forestry shiny-bums began to see her as a pest!

Henry arrived on the forest in 1965 to run the place while the boss was fighting cancer and was more often in hospital than on deck. Pretty quickly he was briefed about Maggie, and not long after he was told she was on the warpath again, this time asking her Member of Parliament to stir up the forestry people in the city office. Henry heard both sides because Alan the MP, a different MP, asked Henry what he knew about the case. But the shiny-bums in the office were calling Maggie a ‘Nag’. It didn’t seem to be at all onerous to Henry, for someone to help old Maggie, so he offered to locate all the survey pegs, flag them and if Maggie wanted, he was happy to walk around them with her. The dim-witted office people thought that was a good idea, and gave her money for the bus fare!

Albert had told him the Maggie was no spring chick, so Henry phoned her on the quiet to tell her he would pick her up at her home in the city. The trip down there was only a bit over an hour. She took a little while to thaw in the truck cab with Henry, but after a while she reminisced about living on the land and the death of her father.

Some people have great difficulty understanding maps, and Maggie did, but seeing the layout on the ground and where the pegs were, she understood and was happy with the deal she had made with the Forest Service. They had even surveyed off all of her sections for her, so she wrote in a notebook all the details she thought were important for later reference. Slowly over time she sold all the sections off, poor old soul probably needed the money.

Apparently Maggie enjoyed her trip and enjoyed talking about old times beside the river. She even thought that carrying water wasn’t so bad after all. She presented Henry with the money she was given for her bus fare, but Henry told her to keep it in her pocket and say nothing.  He never told his bosses that he had picked her up, nor did Maggie, but she did go to the office to thank them for her excellent day.

Yew Tree Tribute ANZAC Day '18

Yew Tree

Taxus baccata, the English Yew, once a mythical and mystical tree has slowly lost its cultural importance through the passage of time or because people have changed. Its modern importance, if importance is the word, is in topiary because of the tree’s ability to withstand severe pruning and trimming. Some varieties have a columnar habit so are useful for formal plantings.  Yew trees were planted in British church cemeteries in the past because its longevity represented the soul as being eternal. Most parts of the plant are toxic, which is also why the tree was planted in cemeteries. Farmers wouldn’t risk the death of their livestock, so were vigilant, which protected graves and headstones from being damaged. Insects are thwarted by the tree, so it was planted beside outside dunnies, ok, proper English – privies, to keep the flies away. The bright red arils, berries, are eaten by thrushes and blackbirds so the still poisonous seed is undigested and so distributed. As a schoolboy, not knowing about the toxicity of the tree, I ate my share of the berries and luckily spat the seeds out.

If the Romans and other early cultures didn’t like the idea of a sword or rope to commit suicide, they used Yew foliage or seed, as a poison. Yew timber was used for making the famous English longbows, the tension between sapwood and hardwood gave the bow added spring. Most trees that live for a long time have hard, durable wood, a Yew spearhead found in Wales has been carbon-dated as being 400 000 years old!

I happened to be staying near the New Forest in the South of England and read in a brochure that the oldest tree in the forest was a 1000 year old Yew tree at St. Nicholas Church, Brockenhurst. The New Forest had been set aside as a hunting ground by and for ancient kings, in 1079 William the Conqueror proclaimed the New Forest as a royal forest, which probably kept it pristine over the next few centuries.

St. Nicholas Church is in the Brockenhurst Parish and the area has been a religious place since at least the time of an Augustine Mission 590 – 600 AD. Records show that by 1160 Brockenhurst had become part of the great de Reduers field, and the Lord of the Manor was obliged to provide 'littler for the king's bed and fodder for his horse' whenever the king  came to the New Forest to hunt. So Norman and Angevin kings may well have worshiped at St. Nicholas.

Friends took us for a day trip around the New Forest, to show us some of the mighty trees, and they kept telling about a 'secret location' they wanted to show us.  I couldn’t believe my eyes when we passed a small sign pointing towards St. Nicholas Church. I remembered it because that was the name of a church on Barrington Street, Christchurch close to where I grew up. The Yew tree association was uppermost in my mind, but I didn’t want to spoil our friends’ surprise by mentioning it.

We were indeed going to St. Nicholas church, not because of the tree but because our friends, on a previous visit, had found a small New Zealand war cemetery. It is an immaculate, small cemetery for First World War soldiers who had been injured, or had suffered an illness but had not survived while being treated at Brockenhurst No.1 New Zealand General Hospital. Of course we had never heard of the Hospital at Brockenhurst, nor of the cemetery but it was a privilege for us to be able to honour the men buried there.

Our friends had no idea that the famous Yew tree stood in the church grounds but were thrilled that they had been able to let me see it! It was a simple coincidence. The tree is not an elegant one, but it’s big as far as Yew trees go!  When it comes to famous trees, measurements are important: In 1793 the girth (circumference) was measured as fifteen feet, and by 1930 it grown to eighteen feet, at present the girth is twenty feet. Girth is measured at ‘breast height’, five feet above the ground in the UK. We must be shorter here in New Zealand because our standard measurement is diameter at breast height (DBH) which is four feet six inches above the ground. Rough rule of thumb, diameter is a third of circumference, so it would be just over six feet in diameter.

When we arrived home a large book arrived in the mail, it is titled 'New Zealand Graves at Brockenhurst' by Clare Church and it details the early lives in the way of personal histories of the men buried there. The book also details the campaigns in which the soldiers fought. There are one hundred and six graves in the cemetery, ninety three New Zealand graves, three Indian, perhaps because before the hospital became under New Zealand jurisdiction, it was Lady Hardinge's Hospital for Indian troops from the Lahore and Meerut Divisions. There are also the graves of three unidentified Belgian civilians, workers from the Sopley Forestry Camp. The book was a gift from our friends.

If I was living in the UK I would probably be tempted to take cuttings and propagate a few plants. There would be little value other than for interest sake, but I imagine descendants of those buried there might like to have a plant. It’s interesting to speculate who planted the tree, did the ancients propagate trees? Propagation, horticulture had to begin somewhere, sometime.

There’s a certificate in the church signed by experts such as David Bellamy, attesting that the tree is over a thousand years old. Say we accept the seed germinated in the spring of 1000 AD, if it did, the tree was a sapling of twenty seven years when William the Conqueror was born! Imagine that!

It is therefore fitting, that St. Nicholas Church is the place of burial for these men, and it is also fitting that the ancient Yew tree stands sentinel over the war graves at Brockenhurst.

‘They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old,

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning,

We shall remember them.’