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.