by Jack Lasenby
“Coming!” We tore up the stairs, and there was Aunt Effie in her enormous bed, wearing her heavy green canvas invalid’s pyjamas, oilskins, and sou’wester. “I’ve got the worst cold in the world,” she moaned, “and nobadaddy cares.”
“We care!” we yelled and watched as a big drip ran down her nose and she caught it on the tip of her tongue.
Marie brought a glass of boiling hot lemon juice and tea-tree honey, all nice and yellowy. As Aunt Effie drank it, we climbed on the foot of her enormous bed, shoved the dogs to one side, and made them give us half the eiderdown and the pillows.
Peter gave Aunt Effie a nice fresh bottle of Old Puckeroo. While she had a swig, set fire to her breath and scorched a bit more carpet, we hung our heads over the side and tried to see our treasure. Jessie looked too far and fell off.
“As if it’s not bad enough having the worst cold in the world, but people keep jumping off the end of my bed, and crying about it,” Aunt Effie moaned.
“I was just trying to see our treasure!” Jessie bellowed.
“Will you stop bothering me about that treasure!”
“If we stop looking for our treasure, will you tell us the story about when you were a little girl in the olden days before anything ever happened?” said Lizzie. “You know, the story of Mrs Grizzle? You promised.”
“You promised!” we yelled. “And you never did! It’s not fair!”
“There’s no need to shout! It’s a long story,” said Aunt Effie. “Are you sure you won’t fall off my bed while I’m telling it?”
“I won’t fall off, Aunt Effie,” said Jessie. “Honest!”
“This hanky’s sopping; somebody get me a dry one.” We jumped off, pulled out Aunt Effie’s hanky drawer, and fought for a sniff of the lavender bag she kept in there to make them smell nice.
“Where’s my dry hanky?” asked a weak voice from the bed.
We sniffed the lavender bag once again, each of us, till it had no sniff left. “Here you are!” we shouted.
“Now, what story was it you wanted?”
“About the olden days before any of us were born, when nothing ever used to happen, and you were a little girl, and you had to make your own fun, and you met Mrs Grizzle!”
“You’ll have to be quiet and not ask questions.”
“We won’t.”
“No jumping off my bed?”
Jessie nodded.
“How old were you in the story?” asked Lizzie.
“There you go, asking questions already, and the story hasn’t even started.”
“Sorry.”
“I’ll start with when I was born, before I met Mrs Grizzle.”
“Who’s Mrs Grizzle?” asked Jessie.
Aunt Effie’s eyes narrowed, her teeth stuck out sharp and pointed, like the time she woke up hungry after hibernating all winter, and we thought she was going to eat us.
“Sorry, Aunt Effie,” we all whispered.
Ann held Lizzie and Jessie on her knees and said, “They promise they won’t ask any more questions.”
“They’d better not!” Aunt Effie took a swig of Old Puckeroo and snapped her false teeth till they clanged. She stared into all our eyes without blinking once and said:
“The Story of Mrs Grizzle
“SEVERAL HUNDRED YEARS AGO in this very house, in this very bed, I was born with a caul over my head.”
Lizzie’s eyes opened wide, but her mouth stayed closed because Ann put her hand over it. Aunt Effie nodded.
“MY MOTHER said to my father, ‘Being born with a caul over your head is a sign of good luck. We’ll name her Euphemia – it’s an ancient Maori name that means “She Who Will Never Drown”.’”
Aunt Effie had just said The Name We Dared Not Say! We stared.
“MY FATHER shuddered and suggested something plainer,” said Aunt Effie. “My mother smiled and went to sleep. That was how she won arguments.
“My father whispered something in my ear, kissed me, and ran away. I never saw him again, and I can’t blame him. After all, what sensible father wants a little girl called Euphemia!
“My mother was always going to sleep. When I was three days old, we rode into Hopuruahine so I could be christened. My horse was called Bonny, a birthday present from my father. As soon as we got into the church, my mother went to sleep, and the minister had to ask me what name I was to be christened. I told him the one my father had whispered in my ear before he ran away.
“‘Strange name for a little girl!’ the minister said, so I bit him. In those days, babies came fitted with false teeth. My mother said it saved time later.
“As we rode home after the christening, we had to swim the horses where the swamp had flooded and covered the Turangaomoana Road. My mother woke and whispered, ‘Euphemia?’”
We looked at each other again. Aunt Effie’s three old husbands were always getting into trouble for using The Name We Dared Not Say.
“‘I’M NOT EUPHEMIA,’ I told my mother. ‘I made the minister christen me Brunnhilde!’ At the sound of my heroic name, the horses reared and whinnied, but I had tied my mother in the saddle, so she didn’t fall into the water and get eaten by monster pukekos or crocodiles. She cried and went back to sleep.”
Crocodiles? Monster pukekos? We looked at each other but most of us dared say nothing in case Aunt Effie stopped telling her story.
Chapter Twelve
Global Warming and the Great Waharoa Swamp, Crocodiles and Monster Pukekos, the Prime Minister and the School Inspector, and Why Aunt Effie Kept Her Eyes Skinned.
“Your mother slept a lot,” said Jessie.
“She needed her sleep; she was growing down.” Aunt Effie glared around and went on with the story of Mrs Grizzle.
“MY MOTHER was scared of cows. Each morning, she fell asleep as soon as we got to the milking shed, and I had to pick her up before the cows stood on her.
“It took ages, milking by myself. I was still pretty small, so I had to stand on a box to reach the cows’ tits. I stood on another box to reach the separator handle. And I stood on another box to tip the skim-dick into the pigs’ trough. I even stood on the can of cream, as I drove the sledge down to the gate.
“I’d make lunch. There’d just be time to do the dishes, and the cows would start bellowing to be milked again. We’d put on our gumboots and run to the shed. My mother would fall asleep. I’d pick her up and start milking again.
“One day, I said to her, ‘I’m sick of getting up early so we can have breakfast early and get down to the shed early so we can get home early and have lunch early so we can get down to the shed and milk early so we can go to bed early so we can–’ but she didn’t hear me because she was already asleep.
“I finished milking, carried my mother up to the house, went back for the billy of milk I’d left in the shed, ran back to the house to see my mother was all right, and started cooking her lunch.
“I’d have liked to go to school and learn to play footy and skipping like other kids. The only trouble was I couldn’t see how I could fit school in between milking the cows and looking after my mother.
“By this time, the water was so deep over the Turangaomoana Road, the cream carrier couldn’t drive his wagon through it. Instead, he paddled across on a raft of koraris – you know, those flax sticks – and collected the cream from the farms this side of the Great Waharoa Swamp. Even then, we were lucky if the cream reached the Hopuruahine dairy factory.
“The last Guy Fawkes, somebody had fired a sky rocket through the ozone layer and caused global warming. My mother blamed my father. She said the sun got through the hole and melted the Fox and Franz Josef Glaciers. With all the melted water, the sea rose, flooded the Hauraki Plains, covered the Turangaomoana Road, and made the Great Waharoa Swamp.”
“The Great Waharoa Swamp!” Lizzie whispered.
Aunt Effie swallowed and continued.
“AFTER THE ELECTIONS in 1840, an unsuccessful politician opened the Auckland Zoo gates in revenge on the peo
ple who didn’t vote for her. The crocodiles escaped, hid in the Great Waharoa Swamp, and ganged up with the monster pukekos that already lived there. Together they started stealing our cream. They sometimes ate the man on his korari raft, but they preferred the cream.
“When I said I wanted to go to school, my mother said she needed me to do the milking. ‘I’ll learn you to read and write,’ she promised. ‘You’ll soon catch up to the other kids when you start school next year.’
“The trouble was that my mother always went to sleep as soon as she started teaching me the alphabet. We never got past A is for Apple.
“Each morning I got up, cooked the porridge, woke and dressed my mother, fed her, washed and dried the dishes, put on her gumboots, and piggybacked her down to the shed where she went to sleep. I made her a bed on some sacks in the separator room, let the cows into their bails, put on the leg-ropes, and started milking again.
“After separating, sweeping the yard, shovelling the muck into the drain, and washing the separator, I sledged the cream to the gate, cooked lunch, woke up my mother and fed her, then piggybacked her down to the shed again. If there was no moon, I had to finish the evening milking by candlelight while my mother snored gently.”
“Don’t mothers do anything?” asked Jessie.
“Pay attention!” Aunt Effie took out her false teeth and snapped them. Jessie sat up straight, folded her arms, put her hands on top of her head, and paid attention.
“ALL THIS TIME, the Great Waharoa Swamp was getting swampier, the crocodiles crocodilier, and the pukekos pukekier.
“One morning, I looked under my pillow and found my father’s plans for building a scow. I taught myself some mathematics and, by that night, I could understand the plans. Next morning, after milking, I chopped down a giant totara, pitsawed the timber with Bonny’s help, and built my first scow, the Betty Boop.
“When we ran out of stores, we led the pack-horses up a plank on to the deck of the Betty Boop and set sail for the other side of the Great Waharoa Swamp. Sometimes it took months because I was still teaching myself spherical trigonometry, so I could navigate. When we found the other side, we’d tie up the scow and ride down the Turangaomoana Road into Hopuruahine.
“I rode Bonny into Mr Bryce’s store and gave him our order. Mr Bryce gave us our huge bundles of the New Zealand Herald, the Auckland Weekly News, the Woman’s Weekly, and my mother’s favourite, the Girl’s Crystal. We read them all the way down Seddon Street to the Post Office, and collected our sacks of mail. Then, while my mother read her letters, I took the horses across the road to Mr Whimble, the blacksmith.
“I remember one trip into Hopuruahine when I was about six months old. As Mr Whimble hissed, trimmed hoofs, and nailed on new horse-shoes, my mother reeled towards us, crying and waving a letter. ‘Read this!’ she said and fell fast asleep.
“‘It has come to our notice,’ said the letter, ‘that you have a child named Euphemia who should be wearing shoes and going to school. We are sending the School Inspector to put shoes on her, and make her go to school.’ The letter was signed by the Prime Minister, the Right Honourable Desmond Kelly.
“Mr Kelly was the first man to be made prime minister of Waharoa. Actually, he only got the job because he was really a bit of an old woman. Women had held the job ever since the Treaty of Waharoa had been signed. Things were different in those days.” Aunt Effie sighed.
“Tell us about the School Inspector?”
Aunt Effie looked at Jessie, and took another swig of Old Puckeroo.
“THE BLACKSMITH turned the handle so the bellows roared, and the fire in the forge glowed. He seized a red-hot horse-shoe with his tongs, fitted it on a horse’s hoof, and I threw the Prime Minister’s letter on the forge. Stinking yellow smoke rose from the scorching hoof, so nobody noticed the pong of the letter burning.
“As Mr Whimble drove in the last horse-shoe nail, I muttered, ‘No School Inspector’s going to nail red-hot shoes on my feet!’ I hung my sleeping mother from the hooks on one side of a pack-saddle, balanced her with a barrel of gunpowder on the other side, threw on a sackful of old horse-shoes as a top-load, and jumped on Bonny.
“We galloped to Mr Bryce’s shop, and loaded the packhorses. Sacks of flour, sugar, rolled oats, salt, and cascara sagrada. Bottles of Parrish’s Food, Lane’s Emulsion, and castor oil. Tins of Hardy’s Indigestion Remedy, baking soda, and Edmonds Baking Powder. Cases of Polar Gelignite, Bushells Tealeaves, Highlander Condensed Milk. White pine boxes of Anchor butter, cases of Blue Pennant kerosene, sacks of Lighthouse candles, and cartons of wax matches – Fern Brand Royal Wax Vestas that you could light in the rain.
“Bagfuls of C.A.C. bullets: twenty-twos and three nought threes for the rifles, and cartridges of buckshot and birdshot for the shotgun. Nails, staples, number eight wire, barbed wire, wire-netting, corsets, corrugated iron, harness, riding saddles, trusses, camp ovens, billies, bundles of axe handles, hammers, pliers, secateurs, toothbrushes, mousetraps, dictionaries, doorknobs, buckets, coils of rope, yard brooms, face-cloths, Electric sandsoap, Solvol, turps, linseed oil, Stockholm tar, pack-saddles, bridles, cruppers, britching, dog collars, swingle trees, chains, scythes, sickles, shovels, spades, and files, and umpteen barrels of Jim O’Gorman’s Irish Whiskey – for drenching the cows.
“What wouldn’t go into kerosene cases and sacks, we made into bundles. We belted pack-straps around them, hung them off the hooks on the pack-saddles, and set off down the Turangaomoana Road, past the sawdust heap.
“The pack-horses knew that monster pukekos like the taste of horseflesh, so they wanted to get across the Great Waharoa Swamp before dark. Despite their loads, they trotted all the way back to the Betty Boop. And all the way I kept my eyes skinned for the School Inspector.”
Jessie felt her eyes and went to ask something, but Ann put her hand over her mouth again.
Chapter Thirteen
Why Aunt Effie Shod the Horses Herself, the School Inspector, What My Father Said About Red-Haired Double-Jointed Women, and How the Bugaboo Ate One of the Little Ones.
“The pack-horses jumped on to the deck of the Betty Boop,” said Aunt Effie. “The clatter of hoofs woke my mother.
“‘Where’s the Prime Minister’s letter?’ she asked in a weak little voice.
“‘What Prime Minister’s letter? You’ve been dreaming again,’ I told her.
“‘It said something about the School Inspector.’ My mother thought for a moment and said, ‘School Inspectors have such romantic whiskers!’
“‘What a fib!’ I told her. ‘You’ve never seen a School Inspector in your life.’ My mother had a little cry and went back to sleep.
“All the way back across the swamp we had the usual trouble with monster pukekos side-slipping between the Betty Boop’s sails, dive-bombing us with their stinky poos, and trying to fly away with the pack-horses in their talons. I loaded my blunderbuss with bent nails and broken beer bottles and let them have it, while my mother dreamed about the School Inspector’s whiskers, and we sailed safely home.
“I thought it was best to keep away from Hopuruahine, so shod the horses myself. I already knew how to do cold shoeing and, under my pillow, I found a letter from my father telling me how to make horse-shoes and put them on red-hot.
We sneaked into Hopuruahine only once a year. I went to the post office, collected the mail, and burned any Government letters on Mr Whimble’s forge before my mother could read them. Nothing happened, and I hoped they’d forgotten me.
“Then one day, a tall man swam his horse across the swamp, jumped the cattle-stop, and galloped around our house. He wore a black hat, had long teeth, and romantic whiskers still dripping from the swamp. Rows and rows of red, white, green, and blue ballpoint pens stuck out of his waistcoat pockets. A lasso hung from one side of his saddle, and a butterfly net from the other. Handcuffs jangled from the D-rings, and he swung a thirty-foot bullock driver’s whip. ‘Crack! Crack!’
“‘The School Inspector!’ my m
other cried. ‘Hide, Euphemia!’”
“I love romantic whiskers!” said Lizzie.
“Shhh!” we all whispered and smiled. “Go on, Aunt Effie.”
“‘HIDE YOURSELF, EUPHEMIA!’ my mother screamed as the School Inspector twirled his romantic whiskers with one hand, cracked his whip with another, and swung a lasso with the other.
“‘I told you, my name’s Brunnhilde!’ I yelled at my mother and ran for the swamp, but the School Inspector lassoed me as I jumped the fence. He scooped me up in a butterfly net, clicked handcuffs around my wrists, and cracked my bare feet with his bullock whip.
“‘I’m going to put shoes on her and make her go to school!’ he shouted. He twirled his wicked black moustaches, and my mother sighed romantically.’”
“Ahhh!” Lizzie sighed romantically, too.
“Go on!” we all told Aunt Effie.
“‘IF SHE’S BEHIND the other kids,’ shouted the School Inspector, ‘we’ll give her the strap! That’ll make her catch up!’”
“That’s not fair!” we all said. “Not the strap!” but Aunt Effie frowned and her six enormous pig dogs ground their teeth, so we held our breath and sat quiet on the foot of her enormous bed. Aunt Effie nodded.
“MY MOTHER told the School Inspector, ‘She knows her alphabet and how to add! I learned her myself.’