‘When is a British commander obliged to endear himself?’
‘With colonial militia, perhaps.’
‘They make a poor fight, flee for their worthless lives, and expect others to patch Humpty Dumpty together again.’
‘I shall remain at your disposal here,’ Fairweather offered. ‘Consider me hostage for the return of the Poverty Bay men. Major Biggs can shepherd them home for rejuvenation, and ensure swift renewal of duty. I suggest Major Biggs might then best busy himself with organising a commissariat and a route of supply.’
‘I failed,’ Whitmore said, ‘to hear Major Biggs requesting your protection. I trust he is touched by your concern.’
‘A martial consideration only,’ Fairweather argued. ‘Major Biggs has an incendiary effect on Kooti, and vice versa. It is not the time or place for a private war. And let this expedition at least be supplied adequately.’
‘We have provisions for a week. More than sufficient.’
‘I respect optimism in a superior, sir,’ Fairweather said. ‘My belief, however, based upon recent observation, is that it makes thin breakfast and worse supper in New Zealand forest.’
‘Provision us for an additional fortnight,’ Whitmore instructed Biggs. ‘And see your men get back here. No shirkers. Otherwise the colonial government may well see fit, on my recommendation, to appoint an adequate guardian of Poverty Bay. Is that understood?’
‘Entirely,’ Biggs said.
He could not have been seen more humiliated. After marshalling Poverty Bay men for departure, he whispered to Fairweather, ‘Thank you.’
‘My own interests are uppermost. You draw too much fire.’
‘Whitmore is a brute and bully, nonetheless.’
‘Whom we may now have need of.’
‘You would defend him?’ Biggs said, astonished.
‘And any commander who makes himself credible.’
‘God help us.’
‘Quite so, sir,’ Fairweather agreed.
Biggs shambled off feebly; Fairweather, after all, found pity for the fellow.
Reliable Larkin approached. His whiskers had been singed by the blast of a Maori gun; he had a reddened bandage about his head. ‘You’re set on staying, Mr Fairweather?’ he asked.
‘Captain. Captain Fairweather. I am now due splendid courtesies. And yes, Larkin. I do seem set on it now.’
‘Then I’ll stay too, sir,’ Larkin announced. ‘I got nothing much to go home to Poverty Bay for. Besides, I can’t leave you alone with that Whitmore bastard. You need a mate. Me too, the way things look. You’ll do me.’
‘In which case, Larkin, you shall do me also. More so if you watch your language.’
‘Sorry, sir.’
‘That’s more like it. Now Larkin, here’s your first order. Get us a bivouac built and a fire lit. Then steal, if you must, some Hawke’s Bay bacon. Desirably also liquor of some potency.’
‘Understood, sir.’ Larkin went.
Fairweather sat on a riverside rock, tugged off his boots, and tipped out water surplus to his requirements. He suspected he might have begun to enjoy himself.
(1986)
Stevan Eldred-Grigg, from Oracles and Miracles
Ginnie
Mum was a little person, and as me and Fag grew older she seemed to shrink more and more into the ground. She was skinny, with a little round face and two little sharp blue eyes. Her hair was sort of mousy brown, twisted into a tight little bun with brown shellac combs stabbed into it.
She stood on one leg a lot. It was because one of her legs was ulcerated bad, and she had bad varicose veins too, and when she was feeling tired or a hot norwester was blowing the bad leg would play up. So she’d stand at the kitchen sink, balancing on one leg, murdering potatoes and carrots. Then change legs after a while, like a stork.
‘Standing at the kitchen sink on one leg,’ Eddie used to say if somebody was in a bad mood.
She spent a lot of time sitting too, Mum, sitting and doing nothing in what we called the yellow chair. It was just a wooden chair, painted yellow, and it had wooden arms and a cloth cushion, and when all the newspapers had been read they was shoved under the cushion. It was always at the bottom of the kitchen table, the yellow chair, and if Mum was sitting in it she’d lean an elbow on the table and hook her thumb under her chin.
Wait till you get to school my fine lady,’ she’d say to me or Fag or somebody else. ‘Then we’ll see the fur fly.’
Or else she’d just stare, looking into space with her lips closed tight.
When a norwester was blowing Mum would sit there for hours. She’d put her legs up on a form and she’d wrap a bandage round her head, just a wet rag she’d tie round her forehead, and another rag she’d tie round her bad leg.
And she’d sit there, moaning.
‘Bloody norwester,’ she’d say. ‘Bloody headache. Bloody sore leg.’
‘Better watch out youse kids,’ Eddie would say to us if we was out in the yard and Mum had taken to the yellow chair. ‘Mum’s got her putties on.’
Eddie called the rags she put on her leg putties, cause they looked like those putties the toffs wore at the polo grounds in Hagley Park.
And if Fag was feeling cheeky she’d go inside and have a look at Mum, all bandaged up and grim on the yellow chair.
‘How are your putties Mum?’ Fag would say.
I’d sort of titter nervously.
Once or twice Mum laughed, but most days she’d wind up the gramophone and start the usual record.
‘There’ll come a day when you might have a leg like this,’ she’d say. ‘And I won’t be here to say I told you so.’
And on and on.
But she didn’t just whinge, she could be really hard on us kids. She didn’t actually bash us, she’d cuff us over the head and hit out at us round the legs with a strap and that, but she was never very good at it, it was mostly when she’d reached the end of her tether and, you know, just sort of flailed out at whoever happened to be nearest. So we wasn’t scared of her bashing us. It was her tongue that put the wind up us.
Like, I had big hands and feet, like all the Ferons, and of course when we was out in the yard playing they’d get dirty. Then I’d go into the kitchen, which was Mum’s lair, and Mum would pounce on me.
‘Bloody pig’s trotters,’ she’d say, knocking my hands off the bench. ‘Git those bloody dukes out of the way.’
And I’d put them behind my back and feel as though they was monstrous.
Freckles too. I had a lot of freckles, all of us did, and Mum used to go on and on about them, saying we looked like a pack of Catholic dogs.
‘Look at your face,’ she’d say. ‘Look at those bloody carpets on your face.’
So I ended up thinking I had big horrible hands and a big horrible face.
Me and Fag and the other girls used to try really hard to do things for Mum, partly cause we was frightened of her and partly just cause we wanted to try and make her feel good, cause she always seemed to be feeling so bad, and we sort of thought that if we could do things for her she might smile or say something nice. So of a Sunday morning we used to get up early, just us girls, and take her a cup of tea in bed. And sometimes, when me and Fag and Hock and Peggy had managed to scrape a few pennies together, we’d buy her a little treat. Like, once we secretly bought a cake of honeycomb chocolate and gave it to her. Or we’d pick flowers from gardens along the street and give them to Mum. But it was no good. Mum would just go all sort of stiff and not look any of us in the face.
‘What do youse want?’ she’d say. ‘What are youse crawling round me for?’
So we never seemed to get anywhere.
No matter what we did, we was classed as second rate to what the boys was. It wasn’t that Mum liked the boys any more than us, it was just taken for granted the boys should have it easy and us girls should be skivvies. They always got more food than us, the boys, and they got little extras too. Like, every fortnight Mum would buy four mutton chops to g
ive the twelve or thirteen of us for tea. She’d cook them and cut them up and give us each a piece. But we all loved the centre bone in the chop, we liked to dig out the marrow and eat it, and somehow the boys always got it and if me and Fag made a fuss Mum would smack us on the hand with a spoon.
‘Stop your whingeing. Wait your turn.’
But it never was our turn, we only ever got a taste of marrow if Eddie felt sorry for us and gave us some off his plate.
Mum would give him a black look.
‘Yer brain’s going soft like yer old man’s,’ she’d say. ‘You’ll spoil them cheeky little tarts.’
The boys always had the best place by the fire too. And there was only ever one fire. Coal cost money of course, and like Mum said, ‘Money doesn’t grow on trees and there aren’t any trees in our yard anyway.’ So there was always just the one fire burning, and half the time there wasn’t coal in the grate. Mum burned bits of wood and vegetable scraps to sort of eke out the coal. We’d all be sitting huddled over the fire, everybody jostling for a place, and just as a yellow flame started flickering in the grate Mum would come in with a bowl of potato peelings, toss them on, and then sszzz …. Nothing left in the grate but clouds of white smoke, and potato peelings curling up at the edges, and sszzz ….
But we fought even to sit in front of that. The boys always won, so it was the back row for us. And if by some miracle there was empty places in front of the fire and some of us girls sat down to enjoy the cheerful hissing of the potato peelings, the boys would soon come clumping in and take over.
‘Out of the way youse tarts,’ they’d say. ‘Shift yer bum or we’ll belt ya.’
The boys were allowed to belt us whenever they liked, and Mum would just stand by. She wouldn’t say anything unless she was in a paddy, and then she’d say, ‘Give them tarts the hiding they bloody deserve.’
The worst one was Jock. Me and Fag hated Jock, really hated him. He was built like the side of a barn and he had black hair, so everybody called him ‘Black Jock’. And he belted us all the time. At night time if us girls started playing up and talking and giggling together in bed and that, he’d call out down the passage.
‘Cut it out youse tarts.’
And if we kept giggling he’d call out again.
‘Right!’ he’d say in his big bull voice. ‘I’m coming to give youse tarts a hiding.’ He’d come barging down the passage, bust into our room, pull up our nightgowns, put us over the bed and whack us. Not just a bit of a whack, but the real thing. So we’d end up with stinging bums and eyes full of tears, and all howling with rage.
You black pig,’ Fag would say. ‘You don’t own us! You can’t hit us!’
But he did.
To make things worse, we had to fetch and carry and clean for the boys. The worst job, which we all hated, was emptying the slops can.
During the night Mum would put an old corrugated iron bucket in the front passage, and when the boys woke up in the night they’d pee into the bucket instead of walking outside to the dunny. By morning it would be brimming full, and the first job of the day for the girls was to hump it down the passage and empty it out the back. Mum had been using it for years and it was all sort of corroded round the sides. I suppose it must of been the acid in the pee. Us girls had to get a scrubbing brush and scrub it round and then pour a bit of disinfectant into it and leave it outside till night.
As we was scrubbing, Mum would come to inspect.
‘Call that clean,’ she’d say. ‘You’ve left it half claggered up. Clean it out properly.’
Then the other jobs would follow. Making breakfast for the boys, washing the dishes, making the beds. The boys didn’t make their own beds, we had to do it for them.
‘The men haven’t got time for that,’ was what Mum said if we grizzled. ‘The men have to save their strength for work.’
So we cleaned their shoes and washed their clothes and cut their lunches and all the rest of it. And of a Sunday, after they’d spent the day galumphing round a league pitch or roaring round cinder tracks on their motorbikes, we had to get their muddy boots and scrape them clean with sticks, and put mutton fat on them, and spit and polish them till they all stood shining in a row on the back porch.
For me and Fag the biggest curse of all was getting the coal once a week from the State Coal yard. It was our particular job, getting the coal. We had a cart, and we had to pull it down to the State Coal and fill it up with as much as we could take, for a shilling.
Mum always sent us off with the strictest orders.
‘I want it full,’ she’d say.
She’d give us the shilling for the coal, then eightpence to stop at the dairy and buy a pie each for Eddie and Jock, cause they was on the night shift at the engineering works. And, well coal day was our nightmare. As the week wore on and coal day got closer me and Fag would work ourselves up into a state and we’d be absolutely terrified by the time we set off down the street, holding the cart handle between us while the cast iron wheels squeaked behind. The problem was that next door to the State Coal there was this row of little brick cottages, and in one of them was a family of Maori kids, who whenever me and Fag went past would come screaming out and attack us. We was so scared when we got near their place we’d lift the cart up and try to sneak past, carrying it so they wouldn’t hear the wheels. But then we’d catch sight of their black hair sprouting over the top of the rusty iron fence.
‘Ai! Ai!’ they’d yell.
And they’d rush down on us, running right up to us with clenched fists and just hitting us, smack on the face. Or sometimes they’d pick up bits of coal and pelt us. We was terrified. One day we even told them that if they stopped hitting us we’d give them the eightpence for the pies, which shows how scared we was, cause it would of meant a hiding from Mum if we came home without the pies.
‘Keep your Pakeha money,’ one of them said. ‘We’ll just bash you up.’
And they did.
Other times they wouldn’t attack us on the way to the yard, but then they’d charge down on us when we went past with the cart full. Me and Fag would hold tight to the cart handle and try to run for grim death. Sometimes they gave up and let us go, but as we ran a lot of the coal would spill out, so when we got home Mum would look at it and sniff.
‘Go back and fill it properly,’ she’d say. ‘You’ve lost too much coal on the way.’
So then it was the awful job of squeaking all the way back to the yard and getting bashed up all over again.
(1987)
Fiona Farrell, ‘Charlotte O’Neil’s Song’
You rang your bell and I answered.
I polished your parquet floor.
I scraped out your grate
and I washed your plate
and I scrubbed till my hands were raw.
You lay on a silken pillow.
I lay on an attic cot.
That’s the way it should be, you said.
That’s the poor girl’s lot.
You dined at eight
and slept till late.
I emptied your chamber pot.
The rich man earns his castle, you said.
The poor deserve the gate.
But I’ll never say ‘sir’
or ‘thank you ma’am’
and I’ll never curtsey more.
You can bake your bread
and make your bed
and answer your own front door.
I’ve cleaned your plate
and I’ve cleaned your house
and I’ve cleaned the clothes you wore.
But now you’re on your own, my dear.
I won’t be there any more.
And I’ll eat when I please
and I’ll sleep where I please
and you can open your own front door.
(1987)
C.K. Stead, from All Visitors Ashore
History is always written as if the doings of ordinary nameless faceless persons such as the young unmarried couple looking fo
r a juice extractor were a grey and ill-defined background to the stage on which the politicians strut and strike attitudes and make decisions and laws, but of course history is not reality, it is merely fiction badly written, and in reality it is the other way about, the politicians are the grey background to ordinary lives, however their strutting and posturing and decision-and law-making may bear upon the availability of juice extractors. So let us put SuperSid, together with Sullivan and Holyoake, with whom he is discussing the possibility of an early election, firmly into the haze of their own cigar smoke and the mumble of their own self-congratulatory platitudes, and focus instead this evening on the gangplank of the Auckland ferrywharf and upon the young couple coming down it, he tall, slim, clean-cut, close-shaven, with neatly brushed fair hair and woven tie, a jacket of harris tweed and flannel trousers of dark grey, she with luxuriantly wavy and glossy black hair in her two-piece suit of grey worsted with padded shoulders and calf-length skirt, and with an embroidered blouse, seamed stockings and high-heeled shoes. Each of them carries over the right arm a neatly folded gabardine raincoat because although the night is mild for this time of year there is the possibility it might rain. They are met at the entrance to the ferry building by Melior’s friend of a friend, a middle-aged woman who looks a little flustered and worried but who is kind and reassuring and who says she knows what it is to be pregnant when you don’t want to be. She has a car parked nearby and she drives them to a tree-lined street somewhere on the lower slopes of Remuera where they get out and meet the friend’s friend who is also a middle-aged woman, also slightly flustered but kind and reassuring, who puts them into her car and tells them as she starts it up and backs down the drive that she knows what it is to be pregnant when you don’t want to be. So they drive across the middle part of Auckland, through Parnell, down into the hollow of Queen Street and up the other side into those little streets with wooden houses clustered together which date from the last century and which at this moment, in the first winter of the second half of the twentieth century, are quite unfashionable and running to seed. The friend’s friend drives them up on to the ridge of Ponsonby and down into the hollow towards Grey Lynn and there she pulls up outside a large sprawling two-storeyed wooden house that must once have been grand but is so no longer, where she hands them over to the person known to her, another middle-aged lady, rather less ‘respectable’ but quite as kind, a Mrs Hinchinghorn she might be except that there are no names. And this lady takes them indoors and tells them she knows what it is to be pregnant when you don’t want to be and not to be frightened but from now on it will have to be a bit cloak-and-daggerish because you know what the penalties are for doing this kind of job so no one will do it without taking precautions. In a few minutes, this person known to the friend’s friend tells them, she is going to take them up the street and leave them on the corner and there they will be met by a person who will ask them is this Clondike Road to which they must reply No it’s half past two. And in a few minutes the lady who might be Mrs Hinchinghorn but who is nameless takes them into the street and they go around the corner and across the road and into another smaller darker street and there she leaves them on the corner. It is very dark and Curl Skidmore is cold and his stomach is turning over with fear at what is going to be done to Pat but Pat is firm and quite severe and shows no fear at all. So when another woman approaches them and asks is this Clondike Road it is Pat who replies firmly, ‘No it’s half past two.’ This woman says they are to follow her and even in the dark you can see that she is making the most of her part. She looks from left to right and moves forward in little darting runs, furtive through two further streets and down an alley between two fences of corrugated iron and through a gate into the back garden of a little house where in the dark Curl makes out what looks like a vegetable patch with a few old cabbage heads running to seed. They go inside and the woman who is leading them switches on a light and suggests they sit down. She is probably the same age as the other women but so glaringly brightly made up she looks like a stage clown or a scarecrow, with wispy dyed hair on top through which the light shows broad gaps like tracks through a forest. She sits down on a hideous mottled couch away from which three China ducks are attempting to escape up the wall, and she hands them cigarettes and lights one herself and is immediately convulsed with a coughing spasm that lasts the best part of a minute. That over she doesn’t tell them she knows what it is to be pregnant when you don’t want to be. She tells them ‘he’ will be here soon, that it isn’t her house, they merely have the use of it, and is there anything they want to ask before they hand over the fifty—and she hopes they brought it in used singles as instructed. Pat and Curl both speak at once, they have each been worrying, Pat wanting to know how she can be sure whatever they do will work, Curl wanting to know is it likely to leave her sterile. Both these questions set the painted lady laughing which in turn stirs up her cough but the answer to both when it comes is the same. It works all right, and it doesn’t stop you getting pregnant again. Half the shop-girls in Karangahape Road have been through her hands (it’s the expression she uses) and most of them are back for a second go before they start to learn some sense. Pat has shown no sign of nervousness but she asks now will it hurt and the painted crone is glad of this question, she smiles receiving it and is happy to deliver her prepared answer, that when you pick a ripe apple it comes away easily but if you pick it green you have to pull. This is so horrifying to Curl Skidmore he feels the blood drain from his face and he has to bend over in his chair pretending to tie a shoelace for fear of fainting. But now ‘he’ can be heard in the next room, and at a knock on the wall the painted crone, who has been passing the time counting the fifty used single pound notes they have handed her gets up and ties a blindfold around Pat’s eyes. ‘Just a little precaution,’ she says; and signalling to Curl to stay right where he is, she leads Pat into the next room, closing the door behind her. No father-to-be, let it be said, paces the floor more anxiously than a father-not-to-be, and Curl Skidmore has no great space in which to stretch his long legs, but the ever-escaping China ducks see him passing to and fro the length of the couch and a little to spare at either end forty times, fifty, one for each year of the century and on into the eighties perhaps before there is any sound or signal from the next room. The ducks are beginning to get used to him, but still bent on flying away from that couch which looks like a huge padded mouth wide open and ready to shut on anything that sits in it, when the crone with the forest-walks through her dyed hair returns to say ‘he’ is packing up and the young lady will be ready in a moment. And when Pat appears, removing the blindfold, she looks a little pale and shaky but none the worse for it. The crone says she’s sorry she can’t make them a cup of tea but there will be a taxi waiting for them on the corner in five minutes. She leads them out by the back way again, turning off the lights as she goes, out into the back garden, through the gate in the iron fence and along the alley, down the road and down another road, possibly needlessly around a block to confuse them, and there on the corner she leaves them telling them to wait and the taxi will come soon. ‘Have some towels ready, it should start to work in a couple of hours,’ she says, and it’s only then Curl Skidmore understands that whatever has to come out is still in there and that it’s not all over yet. And now they look in pockets and purse and find they haven’t the fare for a taxi and they have to hurry away before it comes. They go in the direction they think will take them to where the trams run. Pat is feeling wobbly but they hurry nevertheless. When they stop to rest Pat supports herself against a fence but it is Curl who is sick in the gutter.
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 103