So the country girl had come to the city. The Big City, the New City, the Pakeha City.
During the first week Mahu made preparations for her University Study. She visited a Library and selected the necessary books suggested by Mr Crane, to aid her in Anthropology. She had refused Pani’s offer to ‘do’ the town as they called it, until she was properly settled in.
At University Mahu met many strange people. She was amazed at the number of Maoris in Auckland, and pleased that there were several at Varsity. She attended morning lectures, made notes and studied hard at Anthropology. As a result of an interview with the University committee, she was now studying Psychology, and Maori studies in conjunction with Anthropology in preparation for an Arts Degree. In the afternoons she would take her notes home to study at the hostel.
Often, sitting at her little desk in her room, Mahu would dream of life back home at the village. She would look at her watch, and imagine what her family would be doing at that moment. Dear memories flooded her mind.
Dad would be at the hotel now, drinking beer with Uncle Riki, Nana would be home squatting in the corner of her room mending a net, or plaiting a mat for the front porch; and Peni would be eeling with his new spear, which he made from my old kumara hoe. Peni loved eeling. Kina would be down the street riding his Pakeha friend’s horse, or fighting with the Tawhiti kids next door. And Mum? Mum would be home cooking tea and cleaning up before everybody walked in!
How Mahu missed her old home.
There were twenty girls at the ‘Manurima Hostel’ although she was the only University student. She was sharing a room with Makere Mason, a pretty South Islander, who worked in a Department store in Queen Street.
At night the girls were often out. Although several times Pani and Makere tried to take Mahu with them, she had refused on the grounds that she had to study. However, Makere informed her that a Maori concert party was performing in the town hall and asked if she would like to go along with the rest of the gang. Now Maori culture was something dear to Mahu, as she had been the club leader back home, so she could do little but accept the invitation.
There were ten in their so called gang, and Mahu made the eleventh. Six of these were boys from the Auckland Preston apprentice agency, who arrived in two cars at the hostel at seven.
Mahu wore a dark skirt and the pink jersey her father had brought her, and she combed her hair back in the manner Makere had shown her. After introductions to the boys, she was crammed into one of the cars and they all drove off down town. Only one boy was a Maori, and his name was Bob. Mahu liked Bob because of his easy going good nature, and she spent most of the evening with him.
The concert party was good, although Mahu had seen many better, and knew much more about such culture than her friends. After the concert, the gang decided they would go to a party and asked Mahu if she would accompany them.
‘No, I would rather not, thank you,’ came the innocent reply, ‘I have an exam in the morning.’
‘Oh come on,’ Bob urged, ‘I’ll get you home at a reasonable time.’
‘But I really shouldn’t—’
The party was a success. Mahu learned to smoke and drink, and arrived at the hostel happy and full of fun.
The next day, after the exam, Mahu Herewini knew that she had failed, even before the results were out. She hadn’t been able to think clearly. Why had she gone to that party?
‘Well,’ she told herself, ‘never again.’
From now on she would steer clear of Pani, Makere, nice-looking Bob and their parties. She had to work! Work for her parents, work for Nana, for her brothers. Work so that they would be proud of her; proud to be the family of Mahu Herewini.
But it was hard working while the others went out. She would often hear the boys’ laughter as they called for the girls in the evening, then before they all left, they would ask her again to go out. She still smoked, however, for she believed it brought relief from the tension of constant study.
Then one day, Bob asked Mahu to the pictures. She had refused, but then he asked if he could stay with her at the Hostel for a while. Since men were not allowed inside the hostel, Mahu suggested a walk.
That was the beginning. Bob called again later in the week, and again in the weekend, and soon they were ‘going steady’. Mahu forced herself all day to decline Bob’s offer in the evening, but when the phone rang, it was always ‘Yes, Bob.’ They went to dances, pictures, parties, midnight swims, everywhere. Her night activities grew, and her day studies?
Mahu could feel herself losing. She knew she was failing. There seemed no more will-power left. No urge to work, no inspiration. In her letters home she felt she was lying to her people, and living the life of a hypocrite. So what did she do about it? What would anyone else do? It was easy to choose dances and parties before study; and anyway what good would Anthropology do her, and why should she take Maori studies when she could already speak the language fluently? Hardly anybody in Auckland could understand her, anyway.
So ended the ambition of the Herewini family. Mahu left Varsity and found a job at the Department Store with Makere. There was no study involved and the work was easy, but more important, she and Bob could date almost every night.
Then one day Mahu received a shock. She saw someone whom she had dreaded meeting. Jimmy, the boy from the village. He had changed his dress to the city style and his hair was longer, but apart from that, he was the same. Jimmy caught her eye, and although surprised that she should be working in the store, began walking towards her.
Mahu trembled. Jimmy would be ashamed of her. She remembered the bus trip, and their plans to work for a social position and become Maori leaders. She had failed. What would he say to her?
She looked fearfully at the smiling face. ‘Tena Koe, Hemi.’
He started hard at her pretty face. She could feel his eyes penetrating her shallow mind. She shrank back. He was ashamed. What would he say? After all her ambitions to become a leading Maori, she was nothing. Then she was sorry. She wished she had been true and honest with her promises and withheld her ambitions like Jimmy did, and mastered the Pakeha world. But hold, he was going to speak.
‘Hi, Mahu, come to a party tonight.’
(1961)
Imagining the Other
Noel Hilliard, from Maori Girl
Behold, how good and how pleasant it is
for brethren to dwell together in unity!
—Psalm 133:1
1
The Matiti Valley is twenty miles inland from the Taranaki Bight, in the North Island of New Zealand. It begins where the Turama Stream joins the Waiwawana River. Here, half a century ago, the county council built a wooden bridge which somehow still stands, its railings flapping in the wind, its stringers creaking beneath every cream-truck and tractor. Near this bridge is the cluster of tin shacks known locally as ‘the pa’.
This valley was once all Maori land. Now, the Maoris are settled only on the lean tracts in the upper reaches of the valley. The best of the cow-country is owned by pakehas and every inch of the occupied Maori land is mortgaged to them.
On the slope of Mokamokai, a hill at the head of the valley, stands the homestead of the Samuel family. The mossy gate is fixed to its strainer-post by a twist of rusty wire, and the battens of the fence, instead of holding the wires apart, now lean on them for support, sustained by a few staples. The house is square, with a lean-to at the back and a veranda at the front, the wooden scrollery in its cornices the only touch of frivolity. The roof is of mottled iron, pieces added over the years contrasting with the older weather-stained sheets like the squares of a chessboard. The windows are holes in the walls, without sashes or glass; each has a wooden shutter swinging on hinges from the top and propped open by a stick. The barge-boards, tinctured with rainrot, are crumbling in biscuit-coloured blocks as soft as cork. In front of the veranda a large circular patch of dirt, packed flat, is a children’s playground when dry and a duckpond in winter. Against the rear fence a wire-net
ting fowlrun is built around a ngaio tree; chickens scrabble among the snarled roots or ease themselves comfortably into ditches of dust. A chain beyond is a strip of native bush; the chime of bellbirds and the gobble of pigeons carry plainly to the house.
Haki Samuel came to the Matiti Valley from Kawhia, eighty miles to the north, where he was born on a farm, the fourth of eight boys. The school was ten miles from the farm across a river spanned only by a tenuous swing-bridge; and on days when the hillside bridle-tracks were too slippery for horses, Haki worked in the garden hoeing taro and kumara or tending fruit trees. When he left school at fourteen to spend all his time on the farm, he knew a good deal more about cows and vegetables than about reading and sums.
His eldest brother, Rutene, favourite of the family elders and secure in his precedence, lorded it over the younger boys until Haki rebelled. Aroused from his sleep one night by the cries of Rutene mocking the youngest brother George about his fatness, he sprang from bed and with a blow sent the first-born to the floor. He was drifting into sleep again when Rutene, cunningly protecting himself behind the head of the bed, attacked with hammer strokes of both fists, breaking his teeth. They writhed on the floor, ripping each other’s clothes; and afterwards, when Rutene lay panting and subdued, Haki declared simply: ‘I am going to leave.’
It was a serious decision. He knew that by departing in anger and bitterness at his kin he would renounce his claim to a share of the family land, a share which would comfortably support forty cows and carried native timber suitable for milling.
Nevertheless he left. He worked in the bush, learning how to use the axe, to make the blade bite where he willed. He drove bullocks, broke wild horses, packed groceries through the bush, split fencing-posts, cut scrub, milked cows, drove a lorry, swung a pick in a quarry. He joined a gang in a milling contract and beat senseless the foreman who, at the end of the month, having drunk the profits, announced that the returns from the timber were insufficient to pay shares.
Working as a builder’s labourer on the Turama Bridge, he met Hemaima Te Pano, a rotund, placid girl who worked in the Matiti Valley butcher’s shop. Hemaima’s grandfather, Anotapu Te Pano, a minor chief of respected memory, had once had the decisive say in the apportioning of Matiti land. Hemaima inherited land: two hundred acres of scrub, bracken, wiwi, blackberry, clusters of puriri, a patch of solid bush, a creek, a swamp of raupo and toetoe—no patch of grass visible sufficient to graze a solitary cow.
They married. Haki felled three kahikateas to build a one-room shack with a dirt floor; the creek was the bathroom, laundry and kitchen. He set to clearing the land.
Today, in the place of honour on the mantelpiece in the Samuel homestead is a faded photograph of the couple taken in the first month of Haki’s campaign against the slopes of Mokamokai. He sits on a log. Mud shows on his black singlet, his dungarees and his hobnailed boots. His elbows rest on his thighs, and his large curled hands swing between his knees. His jaw is firm, the eyes stern, the fleshy lips creased in a faint smile; shadows mark deep furrows in his forehead and from the nostrils to the corners of his mouth; the short frizzed hair stands erect and unparted. His demeanour is one of strength and purpose, toughness, impatience, and stubborn self-confidence. Hemaima stands beside him, a hand lightly on his shoulder. She is short and round, with no bosom or waist; her hair, thick and glossy, sweeps over her shoulders to her loins. Her dress, open at the throat and lacking collar or adornment, is ungathered at the middle. She smiles a wide, shrewd smile, the eyes puckered in friendly creases. She is a figure of serenity, of whimsical self-possession, calmly affectionate, yet of the same resolution as her husband. She has none of his visible fervour of line yet she matches his strength. Behind them Mokamokai soars in a solemn curve; below, the ground is pitted and broken in a maze of holes, slips, gullies; manuka stumps jut from sprigs of tussock. At their feet are chips, clods of turf, a strand of wire; a charred limb twists upward from a defeated log. It is plain, in this old picture, that half an acre is his, now; only cleaning-up has still to be done. Then a dressing of fertiliser: one season, perhaps two: and this will be a paddock of grass.
Haki cleared the bracken, brought in more cows with each new acre, built a shed where he milked by hand. The muscles in his arms became like coarse ropes, the sinews and tendons projecting. On chill autumn mornings, as he sat on a box limbering up his hands, he listened to the quiet and friendly sipping of the creeks in the gullies below.
Sometimes Haki looks at the stumps of the kahikateas he felled for the first house and thinks of the early days. The first fruit trees still bear: the lemons seem to get better with the years. Beside the gate to the main road is his first sledge, its bolts and wires now nearly rusted away. When he sees it he counts the sledges he has had since, and he is reminded that although the land is clear he still has to work ten hours a day to keep it that way.
There were nine children in the Samuel family. Two lie in the cemetery of the steep-roofed little church near the pa at the neck of the valley, and two were given away at birth to childless relatives. Of those who grew up in the shadow of Mokamokai, Rebecca is the eldest; Mutu, Esther, Kepa; and Netta, born at the beginning of the Depression.
2
Netta Samuel’s first memory was of a trip to the beach and the magnificence of the sea. For years she bore in her mind a picture of the sandhill where Mum unfolded the tablecloth for their lunch while Dad make a fire of driftwood white as sun-bleached bones. No later visit, when she saw that the sandhill was not nearly as large as she thought and that the sea was a creature of moods, could displace this picture.
From Rebecca she inherited a doll named Sarah, made out of Dad’s old working-socks. She dressed it, bathed and combed it, made a pram out of a shoe-box, using the lid, cut, pinned and pasted together as a hood, and an applebox as a house, in turn a bedroom, a sitting-room and a kitchen. Her only other toy was a ball which she liked to take to the top of Mokamokai and throw down. It puzzled her that although she always let it go at the same place, and never kicked or pushed it on its way, it always came to rest in a different spot.
She quickly learnt that every article had a place and could fetch things when told, in the house or outside—from the cowbail, the garden, the smoking-shed with its bacon-sides and festoons of gutted eels. She learnt the forbidden places: the drains, the creek, the swamp. In summer, with her brothers and sisters she went to the swimming-pool where Turama Stream rested, bubbling, after pitching between two high rocks. Mutu had cut steps in the clay bank to the top of the waterfall. They climbed up, ferns brushing their faces, and slid down the slimy stones to splash into the pool.
Netta began school. The family shared one schoolbag and fought over who was to open it and give out the play-lunches. Rebecca, the eldest, was in charge and kept a firm hold on the bag, withholding apples and scones according to her mood. The school was a single draughty room with a wood stove. Most of the children were pakehas. The teacher, Miss Rogers, was a bad-tempered woman of middle age who boarded with the grocer and had hairy moles on her cheeks.
Her first severe punishment was for speaking a Maori word. They were playing hide-and-seek. Netta hid her face against the shelter-shed and counted to twenty, looked around, waited to detect a movement. ‘Ivan Brown! I see you hiding there behind the wiwis … one-two-three-four-five ….’
‘Please, Miss Rogers, Netta Samuel swore.’
‘Please, Missojers, Netta’s rude. She said wee-wee.’
‘Netta Samuel, did you use bad language?’
‘Miss Rogers, I never.’
‘Don’t tell lies. If there’s anything I can’t stand it’s Maoris telling lies. Hold out your hand.’
Not for many years afterward could she use her own language without an urgent but impalpable sense of sin.
In the evening, after they had spun a knife to see who would do the dishes, Dad ceremoniously lit the lamp and placed it in the centre of the table. Chairs were drawn up, and while Mum knitted and Dad peered
at the paper without reading it, the children busied themselves with their homework. Netta was supposed to learn her words and the older ones their times-tables; but interest rapidly waned and they drew pictures on scraps of paper or wrote cheeky notes to start fights. Dad snapped: ‘Get on with it now!’
‘We finished.’
‘You never started.’
He wished he could be of some assistance to them; but his English was limited to a hundred written words and perhaps three hundred spoken. Mum encouraged them with smiles, cautioning them not to lean on the table-cover with their elbows or they might slip and pull the lamp over. She made a cup of cocoa at eight o’clock, and sent them in twos to wash their feet in the basin; she settled arguments about who took more than their share of hot water from the kettle, and inspected the limbs before bed. Netta sat balanced on the side of the tin bath, her feet in the basin, enjoying the tingle between her toes, making a wipe here and there, scrubbing the flesh of her legs with the towel to make it look freshly washed. Prayers, kneeling in a line on the manure-sacks covering the raw boards of the floor. Then bed: Rebecca, Esther and Netta in one, Mutu and Kepa in the other. The tricks for getting warm: turning on your front, raising yourself on your elbows, and running hard, scraping your feet along the sheets with your backside high in the air. The fights for the warmest part: scuffling, tugging at blankets, pulling hair. Mum coming in: ‘Netta! Stop it! Rebecca!’ The good-nights; and Mum going through the door with the candle in her hand, her broad figure firm and reassuring against the lamplight in the doorway. The warm feel of her sisters on each side of her, the smooth and comforting touch of their flesh as she drifted into sleep.
In the morning she lay on her back listening to the boys getting up to bring the cows in: the murmur in the kitchen, the clink of cups, the scratch of a match to light the fire, the thud of hobnails or the squeak of gumboots, telling her that it was wet outside; exulting in the warmth as she lay half-asleep, pitying poor Mutu and Kepa, lamenting that she, too, would one day have to do their job.
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 83