Memories of Green Island 1946

I often wonder how I survived that year! My mother was not at all well, I struggled in my probationary year with a large Std 2 class, and I persisted in re-sitting a University unit failed the year before. Even at the tender age of 19, I could never understand why anything could be right just because it was the opinion of a so-called superior, be he headmaster or inspector.I am glad that this attitude still remains with me, even though it has caused me more than one argument or confrontation since. Perhaps my running with the Mornington Harriers and our winning of the Otago teams title for the first time may have just saved me from mental and physical collapse!

The headmaster at the time was the religious, upright, fearsome and authoritarian Bill Barham, whose heavy size ten tread along the school corridors was dreaded by children and staff alike. My fellow P.A. and friend Helen Logie shared my fear, though she was nursed along a little more kindly, I believe, by the Infant Mistress, the imposing and motherly Miss Monaghan. Another friend on the staff was Norman Frew, a year ahead of us, who simply hated the thought of old Bigboots bearing down upon him. From our point of view, the Head seemed to spend nearly all his time inspecting and examining us in order to reveal the shortcomings, inefficiencies and defects that he believed were all too common in the "youth of today".

I still remember many of the children in my first class, notably the Parata twins Atanui and Hurene, who were a little bit "agin’ the government". Nui, the more aggressive and confident of the two, would take on anyone or anything, including me, and would also rescue her twin sister in class by whispering the required answer just loud enough for Rene to receive. At times I was amazed that Nui had even heard the question. It was my first experience of that uncanny communication often reported among twins. Then there was Irene Graham, my first experience of a girl not easy to manage, as she seemed to foment strife among other girls by changing her "best friend" almost daily. A chip on her shoulder she certainly had, and we never really hit it off. Brian Anderson was an interesting individual who once regaled the class with a morning talk about his pet kangaroo, which I suspect was a fantasy. But he did it most convincingly. Colin McKay was one of those rewarding pupils who always seemed to want to learn and want to do well. I met him in later life, and he was still the same positive, nice guy that he was at age 8. Others included Kevin Downey (from a Welfare home I think), Brenda McGee, Lorraine Duncan, Robbie Watson, Joy Winder, Beverley Smith, Verna Geddes (a sincere and delightful country girl from a farm at the start of the Brighton Road), Tommy Mitchell (maybe a little older than the rest), Elizabeth Campbell (always keen to please, and lived almost next to the school), Gary Woodford (from a famous cycling family on the Brighton Rd), a Tippetts boy from Abbotsford, Anna Bremner (a pale and quiet child whom I met years later with her baby and pram in a Green Island shop).

We had a School Concert that year, in the old Cinema on the Fairfield road. My class did verse-speaking, which they were very good at. It involved them speaking clearly with good enunciation, as well as memorizing some pretty good poetry, both of these aims being worthy of pursuit, even today, I suggest! The ones in the front row on stage each held a large white card bearing a huge black capital letter, which they kept concealed till the conductor (me) raised his baton. Each child then made sure that the little pencilled stick man on the back of the card was not upside down, and the whole big sign went right across the stage, spelling "STD 2 VERSE SPEAKING". They were trained like a choir to watch the conductor, and to react appropriately to the various baton signs and movements, and the results were well worth listening to. Our masterpiece was an extract from "The Pied Piper" which I still know by heart. I wonder if they do!

Into the street the piper stept,
Smiling first a little smile,
As if he knew what magic slept
In his quiet pipe the while.
Then, like a musical adept,
To blow the pipe his lips he wrinkled,
And blue and green his sharp eyes twinkled,
Like a candle flame where salt is sprinkled.
And ere three notes the pipe uttered,
You heard as if an army muttered,
And the muttering grew to a grumbling,
And the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling,
And out of the houses the rats came tumbling!
Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats,
Brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats,
Grave old plodders, gay young friskers,
Fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins,
Cocking tails and pricking whiskers,
Families by tens and dozens,
Brothers, sisters, husbands, wives,
Followed the Piper for their lives!

Perhaps the most dramatic memory from 1946, though, was the visit to New Zealand of the world’s first active service jet fighter plane the Gloster Meteor.



We all assembled in the playground as the Meteor did its things over Dunedin, and we hardly got a glimpse of it. Then some bright spark, probably Ralph Park, rang through to Taieri Aerodrome to find out whether we might get a closer look at it as it returned to base. The pilot must have been contacted, for a closer look we surely got, as the plane roared in quite low over the village, only to go into a fast vertical climb right over the school. Some of the littlies were lying on the ground by this time, and every mouth was wide open, as the Meteor did a U-turn, and a fast dive straight back toward the ground. Not only had we never seen an aircraft without propellers before, but neither had we known that a diving plane could go so fast, and level out so smoothly.
I will never forget it!

Whakahoro - my memorable year

(text first published in Whanganui River Annual 2001)
I can never forget 1947. Leaving my hometown of Dunedin and heading for my
first country school, I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, as they say, full
of the crusading eagerness of youth.

As Ethne Davidson had discovered before me, it was certainly "in the country".
Unlike Ethne, I stepped down from the Limited at Raurimu with no-one to
meet me, and spent the night sitting on a little cane-backed chair in the station,
only to be awakened every time a train came through a neighbouring station by
the dead-awakening clanging of the tablet machine alarm. I can still see the
top snowclad face of Ruapehu shining in the moonlight for hour after hour.

Raurimu Spiral :Photo taken 24/1/57 by Whites Aviation.

(Permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library necessary before re-use of this image.)

Like one of the Annual's earlier contributors, I knew that it was a mere
40k to Whakahoro, but the mailtruck had covered almost 200k up every side
road, to every mailbox, to every cream stand, by the time Mousie Shaw pointed
across the Retaruke and said, "There's where you'll be staying!" It had been
a 5-hour trip! And as he eased the truck up the gentle slope toward the
farm gate, I saw the Hayes family, all except Mum, waiting to meet "the new
teacher". Old Fred himself, complete with a long piece of grass hanging from
his mouth, a week or more of black stubble all over his tough and experienced
face, was perched on the gate itself, with the kids on the grass in front of
him. "We're a bit rough and ready," he barked, "but just take us as you find
us!"
The kids loaded my trunk onto a home-made barrow, and were clearly eager to
show me the bridge, the like of which I had never imagined, let alone
encountered. It was a swingbridge about 30 metres above the water, and more
than 30 metres long. The huge rectangular uprights looked pretty solid and
permanent, and at first glance the "cables" appeared to be about 50mm thick,
and well able to take the load. Closer examination showed that each cable was
in fact a bunch of No. 8 or No. 10 wires held together at intervals. Freddy
used to joke about it, saying that you'd have plenty of time to get off the
bridge if they went, as you'd hear each wire snapping in turn "ping - ping -
ping -...", and the kids would shriek with laughter and take up the tale.

But the worst aspect of the old bridge at that time was the neglected
decking. Fred had renewed a few vital planks, but while I was there about a
third of the planks were lying in place without being nailed down, so that
you dare not stand on one end of a plank. Another third were properly fixed,
and the remaining third missing altogether. The views one got through some of
these gaping holes of the wet papa boulders below were enough to send a new
chum into a quivering mess. The Hayes family delighted in telling me that
Bill Lacy, well over six feet and with the typical Lacy assertiveness,
actually crawled the last metres of his first crossing. I wasn't much better,
as the kids galloped ahead of me with the laden barrow, causing the bridge to
buck and weave, and the city lad wondering why he had ever volunteered for
country service!
Mrs Hayes welcomed me like a son and a guest, and I was the only one who
slept with sheets. The boys slept on the verandah, sheltered by some
makeshift sacking nailed between the verandah posts, and for extra bedding, a
cow cover or two, and they were quite happy with that. After I'd been
boarding there a few weeks I could cycle down the drive, down the twisty
track, onto the bridge, then stay three planks from the right to halfway,
cross the bridge, then stay three from the left to complete the crossing. I
couldn't always stay on the bike up the muddy track to the road, but the
bridge was no longer a worry. Years later, of course, the old bridge
collapsed while two of the Hayes boys were taking a mob of sheep across, and
it was actually the tall timber supports that failed in the finish, rather
than the wire cables.
The little prefab school was still quite new when I took over. The nine
children, four Hayes, two Lacys, two Wilsons and one little Dobbs, lined up
outside to say "Good Morning", and I heard for the first time the refrain
that was to be repeated for more than a month, "This is how Miss Dron did
it."

Whakahoro School 1947:
Don Wilson, Bob Hayes, Jill Hayes, Bunny Lacy, Rodney Hayes, Isla Hayes, Clare Wilson, Claire Lacy, Jenny Dobbs




We had a rough rugby post out on the paddock which ended at the
Whanganui River bank, and Bob Hayes would kick goals with his bare feet.
The Hayes kids would walk, or ride the pony, three miles to school, while
the others lived quite handy. The Lacys lived across the Retaruke, and had
to walk up to the traffic bridge that figures in your 2000 issue. It was on that
little piece of road that I saw some wonderful glow-worm displays as I walked
home to Lacys when I boarded there. Bob and Jill Hayes, in particular, taught
me volumes about nature, knowing all the native trees, and Bob could even
show me the glow-worms during the day!
Every weekend I would be invited to go "pig-untin", and I held out for a
while on the grounds of not being very keen to kill things anyway. I was a
teetotaller too, fresh from my Methodist adolescence, and again the Hayes
kids roared aloud so honestly when I first said "Don't touch the stuff
actually." Fred Hayes' reply, "You will before you leave this place!", turned
out to be prophetic. I gave in on the pig-hunting too, and this was another
eye-opener for the green youth from town. When Spot or Blue would scent a
pig, and be off through the bracken and the bush, we'd all stand and listen,
waiting for the barking which signalled a bail-up. Then off we'd go, three or
four men and as many kids, straight up through the bush, gradient or no
gradient, just heading towards the sound. I ran quite well in Wanganui that
year across country, and I'm sure the pig-hunting had something to do with
it.

I also trained after school on the road and over the farmland, one of the
best courses being up the winding track behind the Hayes woolshed, and
across the rugged and undulating top country which joined the Hayes place
to that of the Lacys on the north bank of the Retaruke. I was running across
this uneven land one afternoon when I heard someone yelling and cursing on
the hill opposite. It was Bill Lacy, who had come in from Owhango to work on
some of his stock at Whakahoro. The language was so florid, unprintable and
entertaining that I sat on a rock overlooking the valley, and watched the
drama. It was ".. crazy bloody bitch!" and "... wait till I get you, you
stupid, bloody mongrel!" and "... half-witted piebald bastard!" until
eventually the dog managed to get the whole mob moving quite nicely down
the hillside by barking above them. Just when Bill had run out of swearwords,
and had succeeded in getting the dog to obey him, the dog in question got it
into his head to run straight down the hill, splitting the flock in two, and
sending the demented sheep in all directions. Bill Lacy threw down his hat,and
roared to the world in general, "You Protestant cur!!" I could hardly run for
laughing.
While I boarded with the Hayes family, I was aghast at the workload that
fell to the lot of Mrs Hayes and her children. Their father had told his kids
that if they milked the cows, they'd get the cream cheque at the end of the
year. Whether they ever saw the money is anyone's guess. There were 24 cows
while I was there, and four kids, ranging from Blondie (Isla) at 6 to Bob who
was about 12. Blondie's tender years cut no ice with the others, who knew
only too well that 24 divided by 4 equalled 6, and there she was, out there
in the Autumn cold, barefoot in a muddy yard, no cow-shed, no legropes,
stalking her six cows around the punga-fenced enclosure, and taking twice as
long as the others to do so, morning and night. In school, by 11 am,
Blondie's head would drop and I'd often let her sleep. Maybe she was the
reason I learned how to milk, and for a while she could sleep in in the
morning and stay awake long enough to learn how to read. Isla was to become
a prize-winning horse rider over jumps, before the onset of multiple sclerosis,
of which she died while still a young woman.
I was never much of a swimmer, but Jumbo (Donald) Hayes and I crossed the
Whanganui one morning as part of a shearing team to muster and shear a
small number of sheep just opposite Wade's Landing. They took a rowing boat
over, and a hand-operated horse clipper converted to take a handpiece. I spent
the whole morning winding the handle of this contraption, and I can't even
remember whose sheep they were or who did the shearing. But we returned
by boat, with a couple of half-filled woolbales, and I was most relieved that
Jumbo hadn't challenged me to the return swim.

I had a lot of time for Jumbo. He was about 16 at the time, and returned
home to help on the farm during that year. We shared a bedroom, and Jumbo
wouldn't hear of my offering him one of my sheets to make his life a bit more
comfortable. "I'd bloody well freeze with a sheet around me face!" was his
explanation. He was an intelligent and powerful young man, who understood
and perceived more clearly than his younger brothers and sisters the stress
and strain that was being put on their mother in particular. I had experienced
tension in the home as a child myself, but I was not prepared for the worn-out
spectacle of a household drudge that Mrs Hayes had become. She was an
accomplished pianist, and had concert experience, but the constant battle
against hostile conditions and inadequate resources was wearing her down. In
the short time I was there I grew to like and respect her, for where would
they have been without her? Jumbo was in fact a kind of silent threat to his
father, and he was big enough and brave enough to challenge his Dad if ever
he went too far in his treatment of people or animals.

My efforts to get to Wanganui from time to time to run with the harriers
and compete in particular races left some interesting memories. The
Dempseys, who lived about three miles up the Retaruke, had rung to offer
me a lift to Raurimu if I could get to their place. So Frank Lacy saddled up
a horse for me, and I rode to Dempseys after school on a Friday. The real
drama was enacted on the return journey, when I decided to hitch-hike on the
Sunday from Raurimu to Dempseys wearing an overcoat and carrying a little
leather suitcase, not the ideal gear for a long walk! I'm now not sure how
long it took, but I passed through Kaitieke, the Owhango turnoff, the
Kawautahi turnoff, the Upper Retaruke turnoff, and Dobbs's Bluff without
seeing a single car. Even the stamina born of hundreds of miles of running
was wearing extremely thin when I staggered onto Mrs Dempsey's verandah
after my 40-kilometre trudge. "Oh, you poor boy!" said she, and her tea and
cakes were a godsend.
However, my troubles were not entirely over! For out there in a 20-acre
paddock, stood my horse, and when I approached him to saddle up, he lifted
his head, swivelled around, and trotted away to the far corner of the soft,
uneven field, giving me no option but to walk again. At least he stood still
this time, and I walked him onto the road for the 5k ride home to Lacys'.
Like Isla Hayes in school, I simply couldn't stay awake, and fortunately this
quiet, homeward-bound steed carried me home undirected.
When I speak of Whakahoro, my wife reminds me that I'm living in the past;
yet she enjoys her own reminiscences likewise. But that unique valley does
hold a special place in my memory, for some of the reasons suggested above.
So what a thrill it was in recent times to find on the Internet, a 4-picture
spread of the Hayes house and the infamous Berryman Bridge, which had replaced the old one in the 80s.

The Treasurer

When I was 20 I played cricket for Kaitieke. I don't even remember who we played against – probably Raurimu and others. But two things I will never forget. One was the lovely dark blue cricket cap, with the gold KCC monogram, a cap which I kept for many years before it disappeared unaccountably. The other was the function and duties of the club Treasurer, whose actual name escapes me. But I do recall that he was the proud owner of a sweet little coupe car, possibly a Model A roadster with a dicky seat.

Now apparently when the club officers were elected, someone called the Secretary would embrace both jobs normally held by Secretary and Treasurer, including the handling of subs, receipts, and club finances, as well as minutes and correspondence. Then what did the Treasurer do, you might ask? To clarify this peculiar arrangement, allow me to describe one particular match, when the Treasurer's role was so critical.

The King Country was of course, a dry district, where the Licensing Laws prohibited the sale and supply of alcoholic beverages. This did not signify that those who lived there were denied the pleasures of a homely tipple, and indeed the Kaitieke-Retaruke area was not by any means a collection of teetotallers. People would order their 2-dozen crates of beer from Wanganui or further afield, and the transfer of generous quantities of liquor of all sorts from Raurimu Railway Station to their destinations involved Mousie Shaw with his mail-truck, and plenty of urgent private excursions over the hill from Kaitieke.

Now right opposite the Kaitieke School, was a long rough-hewn kind of counter on shiny macrocarpa posts, serving no purpose apparent to anyone but an experienced local, but on the day of this match its purpose became clear to me. The job of the Treasurer was to make sure that by 6 pm on the day of any home match, an ample supply of beer was to arrive from the railhead, and be laid out on the long counter for rapid sale immediately after the game. This is why we saw his little car speeding towards Raurimu during the afternoon, and it turned out that he had no interest in the game of cricket whatsoever. Round about 5.45 pm, the Treasurer re-appeared, unloaded his car, stocked up the counter, covering the table with the large brown bottles which were so common in those days.

The moment the umpire called Stumps, both teams surged across the road, and bought for cash the number of bottles each man thought he could consume. The Treasurer then whipped all the crates back in the car, and drove off. He had already checked on the location and activities of any Taumarunui police patrols, and would have had reliable information on the margins of safety for his operation. But it was as smooth as silk. The Treasurer of the Kaitieke Cricket Club would have no further duties until the next home match.

As for the consumers, once they owned their own beer, they were quite carefree about where they consumed it, and most of it was enjoyed there and then, as we all lounged about in the long grass on both sides of the road. I remember Joe Karam (the lawyer's father?) galloping through on his fine white hunter, to the cheers of the half-sozzled mob, and young Len Ryan (sadly lost later at Tangiwai) and I attempting to bike-race back to the Post Office, but converging in the first ten metres before resigning from the race as we both splattered onto the roadway.

One thing is crystal clear. To have a successful local cricket team, you must have a first-class Treasurer.

Coonoor & Makuri

At the ripe old age of 21, I had just been appointed to my second sole-charge school, having spent a year in the heart of the King Country. I had learned a lot in the Retaruke Valley, including how to go pig-hunting, how to drink beer, how to ride horses, and why not to interfere between husband and wife in a domestic argument! I'd also experienced the remoteness of a cul-de-sac valley, whose children regarded Ohakune as "the big smoke". I was also beginning to learn that every child was a unique individual with his or her own learning needs and learning style.

Arriving in Pahiatua on a Sunday afternoon, little did I realize that the whole Diamond family had driven forty miles to Mass that morning, had been inspected by their meticulous aunt and cross-examined by their grandmother, and were already church- and travel-weary by the time they confronted their new teacher in the 1939 Ford V8 which was to bring on my car-sickness so efficiently over the next few years. Marie was already away at Sacred Heart College, and the bright and curious eyes that darted around me that day belonged to Rosalie, Michael, Paul and Eleanor, ranging in ages from about 10 to 5. On the way out through Ngaturi and Makuri, I was impressed with the greenness of the farms, and the interesting rolling yet rugged scenery - enough patches of bush and glimpses of river to break any monotony, but nothing as forbidding and threatening as the enveloping bush-covered ridges and sheer papa bluffs that had dwarfed me in the King Country. This looked a "green and pleasant land" indeed in comparison. Drina Diamond (and I would never have called her that!) was trim and polite and the essence of courtesy, as she quietly pumped out the details of my background and interests; was she monitoring the young fellow that was going to be trusted with her kids, or was she just trying to include me in the conversation and put me at ease? Probably the latter, to give her her due, but boy, she sure asked a lot of questions. Joe, at the wheel, occasionally grunted his agreement, or was it a laugh, and once or twice barked at the two boys, threatening to flail them within an inch of their life if they didn't stop needling each other. Meanwhile the V8 zoomed, lurched and floated its way around the snaking, shingle road between Makuri and Coonoor, picking up my stomach on its return journey as the notorious cross-springing did its evil work.

We passed Mrs Moore's place, and this was the cue for Joe to tell me for the first time that marvellous tale told by Mrs Moore (when she was the teacher Miss Rankin) against herself. Young Lou was the youngest of a long line of his family that had gone to the Coonoor School, and his family were known for their slowness of speech. Joe wasn't exactly a quick talker himself, but when he mimicked Lou's father and brothers, it was " a reeeealll rustic draaawwwwl" indeed. At last Lou turned five, and went slowly to school, and that first day came slowly home. They all said, very slowly, "Well, Lou. ...... how was schoooool?" And Lou replied, "Ohh, it was all right, but she kept on saying, hurry up Lou, and there was plenty of time." I was later to call at Mrs Moore's place several times, along with the Diamonds' nephew Joe Turnbull and Vic Souness on our way to table tennis, as we all privately imagined that her daughter Dorothy might just fall in love with one of us. My brother and I even helped to paint her roof one weekend, but in the context of our fantasies it was all to no avail, as an older and a wiser man eventually won the day.

My first impression of Coonoor itself, a collection of farms strung out along four unsealed roads that all came together near the school, was a hilly, slightly unkempt sheep country, absolutely strewn with dead timber, as though the settlers had earlier carved out their farms and just left the trees lying to die. The Diamonds were the first house up the road that led over to the East Coast over the Puketoi Range, their only near neighbours being the Verrys, who had no children of school age when I left there in 1950. I used to run up that road for harrier training, and was once picked up bodily in the gale at the top of the range as I turned to enjoy the tail wind home.

                              

On the Makuri road, were Norm and Dom Conway, again with no children at the school, and I was told that they came from a long-standing Coonoor family. Both these men and their wives had a good rapport with the Diamond kids in particular, who called them "uncles" and "aunts" in a sociable way. There might have been a Catholic fellow-feeling there too, I imagine. Opposite Dom Conway was Mollie Welch, who had been tragically widowed just before I arrived, in the days when alcoholics were blamed and talked about rather than treated or helped, and her two really nice kids Helen and Frank were still at the school. Frank Welch and Paul Diamond, when they were little boys together coined a memorable phrase when they were pretending to be their fathers. The one acting as Joe Diamond would ask Wallie Welch to help him, and in 4-yr-old language it came out as "Gizza herp, Wally!", and this request for assistance is still regularly used in our household, and probably in Diamonds' as well. It says a lot for Mollie Welch that she had brought up such good and well-balanced kids when really she was battling the odds.

The other two roads went more or less westwards from the school corner. One was the main road to Dannevirke, the only house being that of Arthur and Elsie Brown, with whom I also boarded during my three year stay. Now there's another family I can never forget, for the way in which, like the Diamonds, they made me feel as though I was one of theirs. Their two older children, Dorothy and Alan, were at the school in 1948, later to be joined by Janet in 1950 and Richard just after I left Coonoor. Elsie Brown, until her death in 2004 in her 90s, was continually inviting us to stay with her when in the North Island. She was a fine, thoughtful and loving family woman, who worked just as hard with her home and children as her tempestuous Arthur did on the farm. Some of the most memorable stories of Coonoor are centred around her fourth child Richard, who in his pre-school years was a holy terror indeed. Not only fearless but imaginative, and rather deaf to any threats or injunctions from his many elders! He had the slightly comic-humorous facial expressions of his father, who continually marvelled at this uncontrollable but lovable child.

On one occasion Richard, when about two, wandered down the drive onto the Dannevirke road, sat in the middle between the heaps of shingle, and played happily with the stones, pouring them from one hand to the other in a dream of pure happiness. At the same time, a laden sheep-truck was roaring past the school, round the S-bend beside the roadman's house, and was already picking up speed on the downhill, when the driver saw Richard's little back and tousled fair hair right in his path. Applying all the brakes and swearwords that he could command, he brought the awful weight to a sliding halt just inches from the boy, who turned his head and looked unconcernedly at the front bumper bar. The driver leapt out of the cab, and carried Richard in to his mother, saying "Does this belong to you?" He was white with shock and anger. The Browns wondered in those early stages whether Richard may in fact have been deaf, as this would explain his apparent lack of comprehension of almost every parental instruction!

Richard was the one who put both hands on the hot stove after being warned not to do so, then did it again after a hospital stay, just after his bandages had been removed. He was also the one who worried his mother sick one day by being missing for hours at the age of about three. On our return from school, we all joined the search parties, into the patches of bush, down by the stream, up the road to the wool-shed, and up through the cow-paddock to the higher parts of the farm. Round about tea-time, Dorothy found him, curled up in one of the dog-kennels asleep with the dog. I am told that he developed, as most kids do, into a perfectly normal, effective adult, in spite of us all. But Mrs Brown occasionally wondered how she kept her sanity.

The fourth road from the school corner was the famous Makairo Track, again with only Harry Smith's, later to be Billy Murphy's farmhouse on the Coonoor side of the bush-covered range. The Murphys lived there during my last year at Coonoor, and the smallest one Raywynne made her name by delivering a "morning talk" which gave away fairly sensitive family details concerning the time and state of inebriation of her father's return home the previous night. This was re-told at the Diamonds' table that night with great glee.

                                    

Then right opposite the school was the roadman's house, occupied for many years by the Roils, the only Roil family in those parts! They were pretty hard-up, as the meagre pay of Mr Roil was supposed to support his wife and a whole string of adult children, who seldom left home for greener pastures. The youngest, Les, was about to leave school when I arrived, and to say that he had trouble with reading would be an educational understatement. Les was a nice guy, and a wonderful uncle to his sister's baby boy, but he left Coonoor School, the only one he ever went to, practically illiterate. The other kids may have sniggered in their own homes about Les's lack of intellectual achievements, but at school they treated him with liking and respect, and actually helped the new teacher to understand the kind of work that Les should be doing. I understand that he, too, developed into an effective working man, able to manage his own life and work with more success than some graduates I have known.

The Roils left Coonoor under a cloud unfortunately, involving some questionable dealings with the killing of sheep for meat, but one thing is certain, and that is, that the whole family were not aware of what had been going on, and nothing will change my opinion of Mrs Roil, a generous and loyal wife and mother, who would feed anyone at any time. My first afternoon tea there was an entertainment in itself. I was thrown a scone, the butter came sliding down the long table in a big tin, followed by the jam the same way, accompanied by hoots of laughter from Jim, Les, Mary and Doreen, who were just waiting for me to look embarrassed. I had learned early in my life to fit in with the people I was with, and that served me well that day. I passed their test by hoeing into the scones, and rolling the butter tin back to Jim.

The successor to Tom Roil was Les Deadman, whose arrival meant that the roll of the school leapt up from 11 to 14. The oldest girl Merle was a freckled red-head with the personality of a sociable gossip, and not blessed at that age with a lot of tact or diplomacy. Her mother was of the same ilk, and one week-end at a school working-bee, when we planted those lawsoniana and lonicera trees that fronted the school so handsomely when I re-visited fourteen years later, she was amazed and aghast to witness a Diamond boy and a Deadman girl, play-acting in the school paddock in their birthday suits. They were in fact cave-people. Her interpretation of that harmless incident was blown up into a federal case, with the school-teacher being dragged into the argument, and poor Merle getting a thrashing at her mother's behest from her hapless Dad. Mrs Deadman's summing-up and justification for all this was "She's not goin' to start that young, she'll start young enough as it is!" In a crazy fit of generosity, I once found myself looking after the Deadman children after school until late in the evening, while the parents let a rental car trip through the Wairarapa go to their head.

Les Deadman once saved the Coonoor School from being destroyed by fire, while it was fully occupied! The kids in the standard classes were busy at their exams, the Romesse heater was almost red-hot keeping the school warm, and there was a coating of snow on the whole district. The sheet of asbestos behind the stove had not prevented the match-lining behind it from getting hotter and hotter, and when Les looked casually over from his morning cuppa, he noticed a growing patch of black on the outside weatherboards, with a thin spiral of smoke where smoke shouldn't be. My first hint of anything wrong was the sight of Les Deadman running shouting past the window, "The school's on fire, the school's on fire!". We got the kids and then the fire out in double quick time, and I really can't remember where all the water came from, or how we managed to get it onto the hot spot. But the interrupted examinees thought it was all pretty exciting.

I remember clearly the first day the third Brown child Janet started school. We had photographs of all the children up on the wall along with a short biography, and Janet's first task was to line up for her mug-shot. As I struggled to frame the little cutey in the box camera, complete with striped cardigan and school pinny, the others pressed around behind me, shouting, "Smile, Janet! Smile, Janet!" I waited for her to oblige, but Janet replied with her cultured lisp, her long I-sounds modelled on her mother's Kentish tones, "Ai've no tender to thmaile!" I still have that photo, which records faithfully her honest determination to withstand peer pressure. Good on you, Janet, and I bet you grew up that way, too!

Another photo I have that recalls the spirit of Coonoor School shows the Diamonds, Browns, the Kerrs (who followed the Welches), and Graham Berry tearing around the school just for the teacher to get his picture. Rosalie Diamond, that angelic looking child with all the classroom virtues, described by her teachers as the perfect pupil just because she kept out of trouble and did her best to please, was out in front, with her brothers close on her heels. Everyone is laughing or shouting, and at top speed.

That same year, I wrote some parodies which they sang at the school concert in Browns' long villa passage. One was sung to the tune of Maori Battalion, and the Diamond family amazed me in Christchurch about 30 years later when they all sang it from memory! It went something like:

School of Coonoor work quite willingly,
School of Coonoor staunch and true,
School of Coonoor (?.............?)
Take the honour of your families with you,
And we'll work and play with heart and soul,
And we'll do our very best,
For home, for school and for district,
Oh - ay -
We'll do the job we've got to do well!
Another that night was sung to the tune of "Road to Gundagai"!
There's a road winding down many miles from
Dannevirke town
Into a place that's called Coonoor
Where the rangiora bushes
Hang o'er a stream that rushes
................ etc.

The distance from Diamonds' front gate to the school was always quoted as exactly a mile, though I questioned that from the start, judging from the time I could record running on this fast slightly down-hill mile! Some mornings, Michael would give me a minute start, and chase me on the old bone-shaker bike. There were times when we flashed across the line together, just in time to start school in a lather of sweat. I mentioned Graham Berry, who came to the school from Makuri as a Form II pupil in the same year as Rosalie. His parents, Mr & Mrs Ken Berry, had taken over the farm next to Corbins on the Makuri Rd, and one of Graham's comments at Coonoor almost brought the house down. We were sitting inside one lunch-hour with our sandwiches, when Graham suddenly asked, "Don't you have to chew thirty here?" Shocked silence! "Whadda y' mean, chew thirty?" "Well," said Graham, "At Makuri we were all bolting our lunches so we could get out and play footie, so Mrs Manchester made us chew every mouthful thirty times. It's called chewing thirty!" Rosalie nearly choked on a sandwich, and Paul and Michael hooted about it for days.

Farm work was a recreation for me, and I put in many hours in Joe Diamond's Donald wool-press, being so crazy fit from running that I was accused of making the bales too heavy. Joe could never quite understand how a city boy could prove to be such a great worker. He added, of course, "I s'pose it might be a different story if you were doing it all the time!" He was not a man to let a word of praise go to anyone's head. When I stayed at the Browns, Arthur too would encourage me to broaden my experience by getting up at 3 or 4 am and helping him to muster the Puketoi Range block next to Diamonds. I rode a very friendly little horse called Wairoa, a chestnut with a creamy mane, and enjoyed every minute of it. From Arthur's point of view it was probably good cheap labour, but I didn't see it that way at the time.

As for the quality of education that children received in the tiny school, it was probably not too bad. Joe Diamond in later years described me as"the last of the old school", realizing that I would probably take that as an insult. I still had a lot to learn about teaching, but I regarded it as my job to make sure they could write properly, spell correctly, do normal arithmetic, and know something about their country and the world in general. We also had fun in school, through phys.ed., music and art/craft. In later years I came to put far more emphasis on speaking and listening, and exposure to quality children's books. But even in 1948, before the world-wide explosion in children's literature, I tried to interest them in the age-old myths of Greek and Roman tradition, and some of the stories used by Shakespeare in his eternal plays. After having told them the story of his "Hamlet", they wouldn't let it rest until we had done an improvised version of the final Act. We had corpses all over the floor! The fact that most of these children went on to achieve well at secondary schools is probably more attributable to their parents' genes and home influence than to any specific teaching skills of mine.

But I certainly awakened Alan Brown's interest in gymnastics! They stood on their heads, formed pyramids, and did handstands. Years later, when Alan was recovering in Dunedin Hospital from a head operation (a tumour, I think), I was aghast when he leapt out of bed and did a headstand in his hospital room! At the age of five, he had come to Dunedin with my brother Arch and me for a school holiday, and we were vastly entertained by his naive wonderment at the sights and sounds of the wide world he had hardly seen before. When Arch tried to convince him that South Island sheep were the same size as North Island cows, and that instead of milking stools they used step-ladders, as the cows were even bigger, he turned to me in the train, eyes like saucers, "They're not, are they, Mr J?" We took him to the pictures in Christchurch, and he just couldn't understand how these huge people acting on the screen in front of him got there. He kept shouting, to our embarrassment, "How do they, Mr J, how do they?"

But life did not begin and end in Coonoor. The real social life for young adults was centred on Makuri. There was a thriving tennis club, and a cricket team that travelled to Waione, Pongaroa and Ora after scratching around for a full team until midnight every Friday. We didn't win very often, and as a reasonable defensive batsman, I often found myself batting out time in the second innings to avoid an outright defeat. I remember batting for an hour and twenty minutes on one occasion for the grand total of 7. Once when opening the batting with Arthur Brown, who had been a good schoolboy cricketer at Christchurch Boys in the early 20's, I witnessed one of the slowest LBW decisions in the history of the game. Arthur's footwork was not as fleet as in his youth, but he always got something in the way. He was never bowled out, and the lbw was his most common means of dismissal. I was the non-striker, so got a great view. Arthur played back with copy-book style, almost touching the stumps with both heels, his bat came down too late, and the ball rapped him low down on the pads right in front of the middle stump. The bowler screamed his appeal, and the umpire Tom Verry, not a long-sighted man and a close friend and neighbour of Arthur, leaned forward peering down the pitch to see if he could mentally re-construct the incident in question. He must have been thinking, "Gee, it must have been pretty close!" and "I wonder if Arthur got his bat to it. Gosh, he might have!" and "I wonder if it would have just missed the stumps." What seemed like minutes later, Tom slowly shook his head and raised the finger, saying with a tinge of uncertainty, "I'm afraid you're out, Arthur."

I was a fanatic for table tennis in those days, and the young people of Makuri didn't need much encouragement to join in in the establishment of a club at the old hall. We ran four or five tables, and the favourite event was a handicap tournament, where the merest beginner could win through to the final, and the scratch players might have to give them 20 points start in a game up to 21! I would sometimes push-bike to table tennis, play till midnight, be put up by the Cecil Berrys, then catch Ken Anderson's mail-truck back to Coonoor just in time for school. One evening I was cycling really fast from Joe Diamond's to Creamery Corner when I saw a possum on the road. Thinking that I could flatten it like a car does a rabbit, I aimed straight at him, as he stared into my strong dynamo light. In fact, it was like hitting a big rock, and I went clean over the handlebars, and it makes me wonder how we survived in those days without crash helmets. We didn't even have them on motor-bikes!

Occasionally, the table tennis or rugby lads would come back from Makuri to Coonoor at night looking for possums to shoot in the lights of the car, and I narrowly escaped being shot by Wilf Tilsley as I darted forward to get a better view. His finger had been moving on the trigger, when he saw my movement, and it was indeed a sobering experience.

I remember my time at Coonoor with great affection, mainly because of the warm and hospitable way in which I was treated by the Diamonds and the Browns, but also from the marvellous times I had with the "spinsters and bachelors of Makuri", as they described themselves on a gift I still have to this day. Names that need no effort to recall include: Charlie, Jean & May Douglas, whose mother also welcomed me as another son, Lola Berry & Roy Jury (who married), Beatrice Champion (she knew how to enjoy life), Joe Turnbull & Vic Souness (from Diamonds) ,Maurice Orr (one of our best table-tennisers), Peter & Janet Wilson (newly-weds then!!), Bede Alpass (never without his jeep), Laurence Dransfield (all-night parties?) ,Ian Whitta (married Jean Douglas), Leo Lindenhovius & Gerald Griffioen (from Holland), Michael Dinwiddie (from Christs College), but joined us for cricket in the holidays.

Joe Turnbull is a nephew of Joe Diamond, and I have kept occasional contact with him through the years. We visited him in Sydney when he was New Zealand Consul there, and he has had a varied and interesting diplomatic career, including Trinidad and Hong Kong. His year at Coonoor was a kind of finishing school between school and University, and we had a lot of fun together.

May Douglas, too, has kept in touch, and called in here just last Christmas. We also called on Charlie Douglas when he farmed just out of Te Awamutu, and recalled with glee the time we sent the women off to church, and claimed that we experienced more religion than they did, as we sat on the steps up the Pori Rd looking at the stars, and wondering what was beyond them. ..... I am still wondering that 55 years later.

South Malvern in the 50s

South Malvern is an island really – not the usual sort with water all round it, but a 5k strip of habitable land, bounded to the south by the Selwyn River and to the north by a chain of razorback ridges with more than their fair share of gorse, yellow clay and scrub patches.

In places tough characters like Jim Smart and old man Abrahams have made the land fit for sheep and cattle, but I think of South Malvern as the piece in between. It starts as nothing at the Glentunnel end where the Coleridge road rubs up against the hill by the Stuarts' place, and opens up around Breakneck Corner to a promising little valley barely half a mile across. There's only room for one road, so everyone sees you go in and wonders why you haven't come out. In those days you couldn't even get through to Sheffield that way. In the days before the tar seal road, your dash across the arena was marked by a cloud of dust which settled back on audiences on both sides in the lull before the next nor'wester. You notice the incongruous suburb where a suburb shouldn't be, almost as though the locals wanted to live at Nos. 3, 5 & 7 on the hill side and 2, 4 & 6 on the river.

Not farmers surely? No, not many of them. You don't know yet about the coal mine and the pottery, the struggling farm, the retired railwayman, or the bloke who works for all the other blokes and gets his share of browntop, or that nice old couple who milk a few cows.

If you stay on the north bank, back comes the river to trap you again at the end of the “island”, just past Norm Harris's sand pit. “Fine moulding sand for foundries. They pay a lot of dough for that.” No, he doesn't need a new truck. He doesn't even need to hurry. “They can't do without it in Christchurch.” That's what they used to say.

Notice the 8-feet high broom up past the school. What a waste of good land! Why doesn't somebody farm it? Quite a few have tried, but it's a heart-breaker. Burn it off, damned near burn down the schoolhouse when an unexpected nor'wester springs up, get in amongst it with the giant discs and roller, and what have you got .. bloody stones. And what do you get next year .. broom seedlings!

We rolled in there in our ancient Oakland tourer, trying to find this place called South Malvern. First we came to the Whitecliffs Post Office, then the South Malvern School, and lastly, the Whitecliffs Station at the end of the branch line. We had just missed the South Malvern station near the Post Office. The schoolkids all said they lived in Whitecliffs, and anyway the South Malvern Cricket Club was actually based at Glentunnel, so we didn't quite know where we were.

Like most country places Whitecliffs had its characters and famous incidents - such as the local hero who showed off his diving to the schoolkids at the pool above the bridge. He dived from higher and higher up the big willow, until he succeeded in banging his nose on the bottom.

Then there was the 14-year-old “reluctant learner” who took off through the riverbed to avoid being kept in after school. He was trudging back towards the road along the church drive, savouring his freedom, but the teacher (yours truly) had borrowed a bike, and there he was just where he had guessed young Alec would emerge. You've got to run fast to school when the teacher has wheels!

And how many teachers, new and enthusiastic, have set up a table for the annual stall,and almost given the local ladies a simultaneous heart attack because “we usually put it up at that end! Oh, we can't have it down here!”

The best story of all, though, is an old one that I may not tell, but some old-timer might just fill you in. It involves a guy called Jack Honey from the West Coast, Canadian geese on the back of a truck, the Coalgate cop, and a round of the houses. It sums up the spirit of the whole district, from Coalgate to Whitecliffs in those days. “Everybody's welcome, especially if we know you. Don't let a cobber down, and don't let an outsider put it across you.. And life's good here, even if it does stand still occasionally.”

Summer was the time everyone waited for. They tried to make summer last from September to May, with the bare feet and the tennis on the hot concrete, and the swimming and the blackberrying .. and the heat!!

                                    South Malvern Gym. Squad 1956

You can still walk through the broom and willows down by the river, and be glad that it's summer – because it's not the heat of the city or the oppression of the grey pavements. It's the energy of blue sky and clear air; of the cicadas in the high broom, and of the young people who could play tennis in a 90 degree nor'wester blowing through the funnel of the Selwyn Gorge. That's why I remember the “island” and sometimes make a sentimental journey back to South Malvern, to remember the old days ... the old ways.

South Malvern School, now named Ron Armstrong Lodge, in the 21st century

Geometry Lesson

They're all so friendly on the Coast! That's what they told me as I
became Head Teacher of the smallest 2-teacher school in the Grey Valley. And
so some of them were, as it turned out. But not all the time. And not all of
them. If you didn't drink beer on a Friday at the local pub, you were
hen-pecked or a snob from over the hill, and if you growled at their kid
in school, they'd bloody soon want to know the reason why you're pickin' on
him.
Now the local storekeeper had four kids at the school, and four more
that had gone through before them, and between him and his wife, who
was the Chairman of the School Committee, they reckoned what they said
goes, and it would take more than a new townie teacher to think he could
rule the roost. Cliff was well known in the Valley, and all the way up to
Moana, as he'd been taking them their groceries in his big blue van for
as long as they could remember. They knew too that Cliff was once a pretty
handy little boxer, and still packed a short fuse. He loved an argument
though, especially if it had anything to do with socialism and communism,
subjects on which he was widely read. Along with the butcher, Cliff was
probably the purest capitalist in the village as far as his living went,
but he could convince anyone after the second glass that capitalism
bore within itself the seeds of its own destruction, and that Christ
himself preached communism pure and simple.
With Cliff's sporting background and my own enthusiasm for any
vigorous competition, it was inevitable that we would ultimately be
playing golf at the school-house, using hockey sticks and tennis balls for
a start, and that his whole healthy family would join us all at tennis at
the weekends on the local court beside the old tin hall. Cliff wasn't a
tennis man himself, but took a great interest in the doings of the local
club. He could remember when Paddy Molloy from Blackball had laid down
the
court originally, and could just about recite the local club's leading
players over the years.
We had a fairly relaxed club structure at that time, and meetings were
few and far between, but I do remember the day we held quite a serious one
late one Saturday afternoon on the subject of the state of the concrete
court. It needed top-dressing, they all reckoned, with a blacktop mixture
on top of that already covering the block. One of Cliff's girls suggested
we stick in some wire spikes at the corners of all the white lines, so we
wouldn't need to re-measure the court. That wasn't going to be so easy on a
concrete court, I warned, so I offered to be responsible for the
re-measuring, if they'd all help with the actual painting. I'd done one
before, and knew how to go about it. They must have trusted me - or
perhaps I put the right spin on it, as they say nowadays - so we all
agreed to cover the old lines with the new black mixture, and take it
from there.
The roading contractor, probably related to the famous Paddy
Molloy himself, made short work of spreading the tarry mix, and left our
tennis court in beautiful condition, finished with a slightly rough
texture more up-to-date and less slippery than the original. He had
levelled it with great care, too, and we were well satisfied.
So armed with tape measures, chalk, string, and some carefully
selected straight edges, I arrived at the court after school one day,
with the butcher's son, our best tennis player, as my eager assistant.
Already in place, and clearly fixed for all time, were the two square holes
for the net posts, halfway down the court of course and quite close to
the edge of the concrete block. In fact, the edge of the block was only
too visible in many places, as it dropped away to rough earth and shingle
all around the court. My first chalkline, I knew, had to be one which joined
the centres of the two post-holes, thus defining the location of the net. We
then measured the width of the block at this point, subtracted the legal
width of a doubles court, and divided our answer by two, thus arriving
at the points at which the sidelines would cross the netline. Then,
using our vast knowledge of Pythagoras's theorem, we chalked out a
right-angled triangle whose two shortest sides were the sideline on one
side of the net and the netline. Doing this four times gave us the
precise corners of the court. In order to check that we did in fact have a
rectangle, we measured the two hypotenuses which lay like a giant cross
on each side of the net, and found that they were equal. Even the
butcher's son, who had no pretensions of mathematical genius, could see
that this test proved that our half-court lay exactly square with the
net, and that all the angles were 90 degrees.
At this stage, we could both see that the sidelines of the tennis
court were not at all parallel to the edge of the concrete block. In
fact,
where there was about three feet clear outside each post-hole, it looked
closer to five feet at one end, and more like five inches at the other! The
other side looked the same, so that the chalked court, ready for painting,
appeared more like a non-square parallelogram than a rectangle. We
must have made a mistake, we thought, so we re-measured all the diagonals
of each half-court, and the two huge diagonals of the whole court. Again
these diagonals were equal. It was of course the concrete block that was
wrong. And we couldn't move the post-holes.
I looked at the butcher's son, who was scratching his head at
this wonderful conundrum. "Well," I said, "You're the tennis player. Do we
want to play all our home tennis on a rhomboid court and have a safe space
to run off the sideline all round, or do we want to play on a court
that is the regulation size and shape?" We quickly agreed that the tennis
court had to be square with the net, and people would just have to get
used to the optical illusion, for that's what it was indeed. So we got out
the paint-pots, and were soon joined by the willing brush-hands, and soon
the new shining white court lay there complete, plenty of runback space
at both ends, but a long black wedge of land down both sides, and
certainly not in the exact place where its predecessor had been located.
We had just finished, and the Zip in the clubhouse was whistling us
in, when along came Cliff, hands thrust deep in his old cardigan pockets,
eagle eyes ready for critical inspection. He came up the slope from the
road, so that his first view of the new court was straight up one of the
tramlines, as tennis players call them. From Cliff's end, the space outside
the court looked almost six feet, and as it raked its way down toward the
clubhouse at the other end, the outside line appeared to be
wandering in
for a cup of tea itself, so crazily crooked did it look from there. Cliff's
scream of despair brought us all onto the verandah, as he waved his arms
about in sheer anger.
"You've buggered it up!" he cried, "it's all to hell! How can you
play tennis on that? They'll all be breaking their ankles when they fall
off the edge! Christ, it's not even square! I told them not to leave
it to some townie teacher!"
I could take no more. "Yes, it's square all right, Cliff. It's the
bloody concrete block that's crooked. And we have to have a tennis court
the right shape and size."
"I don't believe it!" shouted he, "Old Paddy Molloy would never have laid
a concrete block crooked in his life! I'll prove it to you. I'm going home
for my big builder's square." And off he went. He came back with a
huge right-angled builder's square, and two extremely heavy pieces of 4
by 3 balanced on his shoulders. He could hardly walk for the weight, but
anger and righteousness were keeping him going.
He dropped the timbers at the first corner, and laid them against
the outside edge of the concrete block so that they formed an L
around
the corner. He then lifted the big square and tried to fit it into what
he was maintaining was a right angle. But it just wouldn't go in, for this
was the acute angled corner. Nev swore under his breath, shook his head
a dozen times, and rushed all his gear across to the other side. Down
went the 4 by 3's, in went the square, and this time it had plenty of
room, for this was the obtuse angled corner. The square wobbled madly as
it strove in vain to touch both timbers at the same time.
"God!", said Cliff, breathing quickly after all this exertion and
stress, "I'd never have believed it! I'd never have believed it!" While
Nev's faith in the legendary Paddy Molloy had been dented, he never
agreed with our action in the matter. Every time he appeared at the court,
he would peer down the convergent sideline, shake his head yet again, and
declare, "It's still a crazy way to mark out a bloody tennis court!"