Otago Born & Bred: Norah (1925-2015)

Norah and I first met in January 1951, when we were both selected to run for Otago against Canterbury in Christchurch. She wondered who this Jelley guy was, as he had never run for Otago before. In fact Hawkes Bay-Poverty Bay later claimed me to run for them in the NZ Championships 3-mile.   I had been running for Dannevirke Harriers for three years.   We both won our events at Christchurch, and noticed each other for the first time.

That year, 1951, was an exciting one for both of us. Our mutual attraction and friendship blossomed, and our Saturday nights to movies and to dances helped us both to realise that getting married might be the very best idea.   There were times when we danced to tunes like "It's the Loveliest Night of the Year" so happily and so much in love, that we often had to escape the dance hall to enjoy each other's company alone, and usually in the open air.    Norah was club captain of the champion athletic club Otago Ladies, as well as a crucial member of the 4 x 100 yd relay team which set a NZ record in 1948, a time which stood for nearly three seasons.   Again we both travelled in the Otago team, this time to Oamaru, where Norah had run previously, to the North Otago Championships.   On this occasion we knew each other much better than on the previous occasion, and came back to Dunedin by train, as a recognized couple in the eyes of the other team members.

I once asked Norah whether she had ever considered living in the country, and she wanted to know why I would ask such a question.   My thinly disguised purpose was to tell her that some country schools had teacher's residences, and while it wasn't quite a proposal as such, she recognised it as one, and hoped that I would ask her father to approve of the idea.   We didn't consider that her father's approval was required as it might have been in years gone by, but I did tell him one night that we were hoping to marry in December, and what would he think about that.    The Glaswegian was delighted, and he set out to tell the world. Norah really appreciated his being asked.     Norah being a coat machinist and her sister Isobel a trouser machinist, they were looking forward to making their father a new suit for the wedding, and so they did, and superlatively well.

I did a lot of running that year, much of it from the Donalds' house in Corstorphine to the Jelley house in Mornington, and my best performances were recorded on track and cross-country.   Norah's sisters, Isobel and Mary, were self-appointed bridesmaids, my best man was Lloyd Swanson, who had been at Teachers' College with me, during which time we did holiday work in the tobacco fields of Riwaka, and biked home to Dunedin on bikes which had exactly one gear each.   Mine was my brother Charlie's original racing bike, on a fixed gear.   Any track cyclist will know how hard that must have been riding up the Motueka Valley and over Lewis Pass.   The groomsman was a young St Kilda runner whom I had been coaching, Warren Cooper, later to be better known as a Cabinet Minister and Mayor of Queenstown. I had promised him that if he did at least half of the training I was doing, he would make the Otago cross-country team in August. He simply did not believe that, but did the work, made the team, and came 5th in the junior Nationals at Wingatui.

We didn't allow our Motueka honeymoon to interrupt our running training, and a few weeks later I decided to challenge Norah over 100 yards for the family title. We held the event on the Caledonian Ground, with a proper starter, judges and finishing tape. I was so confident of my speed at the end of distance races that I thought I could probably mow her down in time to win. However, she got such a fine start that she had about five yards on me before I was into my stride, and all I saw of her after that was her back. She still held the 5-yard advantage at the tape.

House-hunting had not been at all rewarding, so we settled for my Mum's Ocean View crib, which had no kitchen or laundry as we now know them. Norah did so well at managing that little place, that we stayed there for 17 months, until I scored a country school with a house, at Whitecliffs, Canterbury. Our daughter Denise had been born in December 1952, and we had the doubtful asset of our old Oakland car, which used to boil over on the way to town, before it got to Lookout Point. We travelled to South Malvern (Whitecliffs) in the Oakland, with our lovely little 5-month old daughter. When we arrived, our bedroom furniture and old lounge suite had arrived before us, and the School Committee men had set them all up, and already warmed the house. Our bedroom was the one they chose for us, and it was a good choice. It was a cold old villa with a long linoleum-clad passage, but for us it was our first house, and we made the best of it. Denise learned to slide up and down the passage, as this was more effective than crawling.

South Malvern was a sole-charge school, with up to 34 pupils of all ages. That is the hardest work I have ever done. (See earlier blog on those years)

When Denise was two, our son Kevin made his presence felt, and he arrived in August, with Norah feeling quite glad that she hadn't been pregnant through the hot, dry Whitecliffs summer. We both used our bikes, especially when the Oakland had disappeared, and sometimes went as far as Coalgate 4 miles away, with the kids in little seats on the bikes. On one of these occasions, Denise as a 4-year-old planted a named tree in the Schools Plantation. This is now a forest, with individual trees unrecognizable. The constant stress of a big sole-charge was taking its toll, and led me to apply for 2-teacher schools, the one I secured being Stillwater Junction, on the West Coast. My assistant teacher there was a 22-year-old Rugby winger, tennis player, and fine pianist John Patrick, who has become a lifelong friend. John and I would sometimes meet at the tennis court at 6 am on a summer morning, and play till 8 before school.

Our schoolhouse was a new bungalow, which had been occupied only a year or two by the outgoing teacher, and Norah found it such a lovely, modern, comfortable home.

While we were there we bought a middle-aged Ford Prefect, which we drove to Dunedin one holiday without staying a night anywhere in between. Denise started school at Stillwater, and would say Goodbye to Daddy when he went to school, only to join in with her peers later to say Good Morning Mr Jelley in the typical sing-song fashion. Before Denise turned five, Norah would take both children into Greymouth in the bus, have lunch in town, and return before school was out. She was a great caring mother who thought of nothing but the good and welfare of her family. I will always be grateful to her for that, and feel fortunate to have met her in the first place.

At Stillwater, as well as at Whitecliffs, we played a lot of tennis, and the Blog story entitled Geometry Lesson, is about the Stillwater tennis court. Families we got to know through tennis particularly included the Moffitts, the Fensoms, and the Bankses. Cliff Moffitt was the local storekeeper, who delivered for miles around, including to Moana, Nelson Creek and the Grey Valley, and he and I played quite a bit of tennis ball golf on the schoolhouse lawn. When we eventually moved to Christchurch, mainly to ensure better educational and vocational futures for our kids, Cliff told me I was crazy. I don't believe we were.

I was appointed to Elmwood Normal in May 1959, and when Kevin was old enough to start school, our local Kendal School had not yet opened. So I took him to Elmwood, and Norah would bike or bus there at 2 pm to pick him up. It was a busy time, but again it was Norah's thorough care and attention to her children's welfare which got us through it successfully.

We lived in that Charlcott St house for 30 years, and while I was finishing degree work and working full-time, Norah did absolutely everything in the home and in the garden, and it was a lovely, welcoming place to come to. I repeat that I was fortunate to be sharing life with her at such a crucial time in the lives of Denise and Kevin. When we went to UK on a study tour which I had organized from work, Denise was working and living in Worcester UK, and Kevin came with a friend to see a bit of Europe. We all met together in London, where we secured a flat for Kevin and his mate the day before they arrived. Denise then took him up to Worcester for a weekend. It was a happy occasion.

We then helped to re-draft the plans of a new house in Maidstone Rd behind the Waimairi Rd shops. We made the whole house one metre wider than it was on the plan, transforming it into an excellent roomy retirement home. However, the night-time noise from the service lane, and a loud music problem from next door made us think again, and so we shifted to an even better home here in Parklands. Also, since 1980, we have enjoyed the marriages of Denise and Kevin to fine young people, Ian McGregor and Suzanne O'Brien, with whom we have got on magnificently. For about 30 years they have all gathered at our place for Xmas tea, and they have done the work to free up Norah completely. Each couple produced a son and a daughter, and these four grand-children have been a joy to us. This quite old photo is about the only one which shows Norah with her four grand-children in the 90s.

Norah has always been a family person. She not only loved her own children, their spouses and their children, but also kept up a permanent loving interest in her own brother and sisters and their families. The younger of her two sisters Mary, suffered from the onset of hydatids at a time when it had been almost eradicated in NZ, but was harmed and weakened by it for 38 years before she died in 2005 while still managing Southland Radio. The middle sister Isobel and Norah were extremely close, and in their sporting years in Dunedin, practically inseparable. They have kept their close relationship intact, and on our fridge to this day, there is a magnet message which says, "There's no friend like a sister, and no better sister than you," They would both have agreed with that.

Norah died peacefully in hospital on the day before her 90th birthday in February 2015, and I had been with her just hours before. She had been full of energy then as she berated the nurses for trying to get a line into her arm. But apparently she calmed right down in the early morning, and closed her eyes for the last time. A heart event, probably caused by poor blood flow, was the apparent cause, and did not seem to have awakened her. When we married, we said something like, "Love, honour and cherish, till death us do part."
And for 63 years, that promise has been kept. What a treasured memory!