For “The Sea Wolf” the war was over.
In 1938 he sailed round the world in his yacht and spent some weeks in New Zealand reunited with the friends he had made while a prisoner. The press gave him a royal amount of space and his one-time enemies queued to buy tickets for his lectures. The climax of every one was when he picked up the telephone directory and tore it in half with his bare hands.
My sister Elisabeth met him a few years ago at a party when she travelled from New York to Southampton on the same ship and he spoke of his visits to New Zealand both as prisoner and lecturer with enormous pleasure and affection.
She asked him if he had ever taken the war seriously or worried about the risks and danger he incurred.
“Risks? Danger?” he repeated, took out his monocle, sparkled it on his handkerchief and put it back in one nostalgic eye. “Ah my dear, those days were different. We were all gentlemen then.”
* * *
Darryl Cotter who farms the island drove us round the deserted alleys and empty buildings. We read the inscriptions on a row of headstones that mark the graves where victims of the 1918 influenza epidemic are buried. They were crewmen off a merchant ship called the Amokura and the captain’s wife, who died nursing them, is buried here too. There is an olive grove where the land starts to slope towards the beach and, according to legend, Sir John Logan Campbell planted it when he farmed here in 1843. Brisk little rattles of fantails spread their tails and hop along the branches, the trunks are gnarled and knotted as at Gethsemane, but our sun is not quite warm or constant enough and they bear only small, bitter fruit.
We bumped down the drive through a double rank of Norfolk pines on our way to the farm. In spite of the thousand or more people who were encamped on the beach that day, when we arrived at the far end of Motuihe we might have been on any back-country farm. At night the Cotters can see the lights of the city, they have a direct telephone link to the mainland, but now that the navy has gone there is no regular boat. Once Easter is past, the ferries give up their weekend visits and then there is only a stores ship that calls once a week.
There is always the amphibian, though, and presently we heard the Widgeon faintly in the distance.
“That’s Fred” said Barbara Cotter, “Or Bruce, one of the boys anyway. They drop us the morning Herald.”
The engines grew louder and, with a roar that almost took the roof off the house, the aircraft swooped across the island and the pilot shied over the side a rolled-up newspaper which bounced down the home paddock.
Barbara put down her infant son Nicholas and sprinted across the fence to get it. Over the masthead Captain Ladd had written one of the poems which would run to several volumes if they were gathered up from every farmhouse in the Gulf. Fred is no McGonagle but he has a poet’s licence as well as a pilot’s.
Greetings shepherds with your sheep
Here’s your friend Fred just roused from sleep.
The sun is shining and I can’t stop,
But here’s the news down your chimney pot.
XXX Fred Ladd
Darryl had a mob of sheep waiting to be dipped and, the dogs bounding and barking at our heels, we walked up to the yards built beside a clump of pohutukawas half way up the hill from the beach, where the scow ties up at low tide.
He sent the first dozen sheep up the race. They were being sprayed for lice and it was squirted on like lacquer at the hairdresser’s. Barbara and I hung over the rails helping a slow coach along with a bit of a push. She is tall, boyish looking and a champion horsewoman who has ridden in every major show in the Dominion and at the Royal Easter Show at Sydney.
“Darryl and I aren’t islanders born,” she told me. “He comes from Pahiatua down in the Wairarapa and I’m from Te Puke on the East Coast. Vernon was nearly a Motuihian — he came a bit before time and I nearly had him on the launch going in to town.”
“Get along!” Darryl shouted and urged the stragglers on down the line. The sheep hardly bleated; there was only the drumming of their hooves on the dry leaves, the sharp hissing of their breath and a shuddering cough when they went under the spray. The afternoon sun burned down on the eddies of dust as the last of the mob tumbled into the paddock and Darryl, with Vernon on the crook of his saddle, cantered off to turn them loose.
When he came back, we drove across the fields to almost the end of the island and clambered down the gully supposed to be von Luckner’s. Its steep banks were ribbed with supplejack and tree roots, a stream oozed through the leaves and dropped into a dank pool at the fence line. Barbara had followed us to the beach on horseback, her handsome black gelding trotting through the loose dry sand, grey puffs of it rising round his fetlocks. They had a clear run along the water’s edge and she let him go. The thin sound of galloping hooves on the wet sand mixed with the surf and the distant murmur of the picnickers.
The ferry would come on only two more days, then the Cotters would begin their winter solitude. The trippers were starting to straggle back to their boat. Shrill voices summoned children from the rocks, families gathered and set off, little boys carried pop bottles and plastic bags with cockabullies swimming about inside, their sisters had bucketsful of shells and limp bunches of kelp. The ferry gave a warning hoot and the passengers hurried up until the last one had vanished over the cutting that led to the wharf. We were flying home; five minutes and we would be there.
The beach was empty now except for the mounds and moats left by the sandcastle builders. The Cotters waved and, as we were airborne, we saw them turn and wander off towards the farmhouse. Motuihe was once again their own.
* * *
Motutapu is a large, bland, loaf-shaped island, patted into its present mould eight hundred years ago when Rangitoto erupted. Its kauri forests were drenched with ash and buried like the campsites of the Moa Hunters who lived here in the shadowy days before the Seven Canoes of the great migration sailed south from Hawaiki.
None of the early travellers like d’Urville or Cruise gives Motutapu more than passing mention in their diaries, nor do they speak of much Maori settlement. It was not sold to a European until 1854. The price was modest enough for 3,700 acres: ten empty casks, four double-barrelled guns, fifty blankets, five hats, five gown pieces, five shawls and five pairs of black trousers. Two brothers called Reid bought it in 1869 and their family owned it for eighty years until the army took it over during the last war. It has never gone back to private ownership and its present farmers are the Lands and Survey Department.
The farm manager and his wife, Mr and Mrs Bill Bennett, live at Home Bay in the old Reid house. The sea imposes the same isolation on them as it does on the Cotters of Motuihe.
I went there first in the later summer of 1964 and again about a year later. There were three children living on the island in 1964; their father was a shepherd on the farm. We came ashore after lunch when the smallest school in New Zealand was about to start afternoon classes. The little schoolhouse was almost on the beach, about fifty yards or so from the homestead, and there was a seesaw in front of it made from a plank and a gunspring. The three children, Murray, Jenny and Cindy Hasset, were in the playground playing ball with the teacher, Peter Wood. At two o’clock the bell was rung, and, as if thirty children were there, the Hassetts formed a little file of three and marched indoors. Inside were tables with papier-mache relief maps spread on them and the walls were patchworked with the children’s drawings and hygienic looking Health Department posters about brushing your teeth and eating apples. A mobile hung from the ceiling. It had been made by the children from fragments of coloured glass they had picked up on the beach and then threaded on to a bare pohutukawa branch. The sun shone through it, picking out flickering tongues of green and amber, amethyst and blue.
We left them to their lessons and climbed the hill above Home Bay where James Reid and his wife are buried. His grave is marked with a tall, acorn-topped column of black marble, his wife’s is enclosed in a wrought iron railing. Only a few boats were at anchor
in the bay; the launch we had come in, a keeler and a small blue trimaran.
When the Reids lived here the bay was not often so quiet — Motutapu’s hospitality was famous. They stocked the island with red deer and wallaby and shooting parties would sail merrily over from Auckland. A colony of ostrich were established and only disbanded when the plumes went out of fashion and Emu Bay was named for a family of emus who were liberated there in the Eighties. An old friend who has known the islands all his long life told me of a deerstalking party who came in one night bursting with the news that the giant moa was not extinct after all. They had encountered two monstrous birds in a distant gully. Investigation showed, alas, that they were only the emus.
In 1894, the New Zealand Graphic, an illustrated paper, ran a story about Motutapu describing the gaieties on the island. “No distinguished visitor that comes to Auckland, but makes a trip to Motutapu” it began. Embellished with drawings of ostrich and emu, wallaby and deerstalkers in knickerbocker suits, it numbered “English admirals and Russian Grand Dukes” among the famous people who came to the island. There is even a legend that Nellie Melba visited here too.
Motutapu was famous for the massive picnics of the day, not necessarily exclusive enough for grand dukes but for anyone who liked to buy a shilling round ticket from the Ferry Company. I found a yellowed pair of photographs at the Auckland Public Library. One is a flyspotted enlargement with no date, just “Home Bay, Motutapu.” It shows an all-male gathering on the deck of a ferry boat; in the foreground a buffet laden with champagne bottles is set up and the merrymakers, bearded and mustachioed, their swelling waistcoats laced with thick gold chains, stare grimly at the camera, fixed in the interminable seconds of an Edwardian time exposure. Perhaps it was a yachtsman’s wake.
The other picture is a postcard dated 1905; this time all the family had come. A real Motutapu picnic might see 5,000 people in the bay and ferries tied up both sides and the full length of the wharf. The Whakatiri used to bring excursions all the way from Thames; she was a paddle steamer and every year the gold miners and their families chartered her for their Boxing Day picnic. They left at dawn to sail up the Gulf with flags flying and bands playing and descended on the beach in squads. There would be whale boat races and games for the children who looked forward to their picnic all year long and then treasured the memory of it for twelve months after. Perspiring mothers in their petticoated best chivvied their young and kept the tea boiling. The men were refreshed from the barrels of beer they had rolled along the jetty and the young fellows competed for the greasy pig. A pig slick with mutton fat was turned loose and dozens of men whooped after their squealing quarry in sticky fingered pursuit. The prize was the pig.
The postcard picture must have been taken from the hilltop where the graves are; crowds promenade along the beach and the pines which still divide the grass from the flat are perhaps fifteen or twenty feet shorter.
When you sit there now, the view has hardly changed. The homestead is just the same, with a clump of puriri trees on the front lawn and a rambling orchard at the back. When I was there the persimmon trees were hung with little orange lanterns of ripening fruit, the grass was scattered with belladonna lilies, a mopheaded old sheep dog browsed by his kennel snapping at the flies and I never saw such walnut trees, with branches like tents, hooped under their load of sticky nuts.
Mr and Mrs Bennett, the farm manager and his wife, came to Motutapu about four years ago. They are middle-aged, their family is grown up and all their married life has been spent on the land working back-country farms.
“But islands are different again” and Mr Bennett looked to his wife for agreement.
“Islands don’t suit everyone” she said. “You need to get used to them.”
When I came back a year later, the Bennetts were just the same, as were the persimmons and the walnuts in the orchard; even the dog still lay by his kennel as if he had not stirred. The family with the three children had gone, though, and the little schoolhouse was closed. Last year’s pet lamb was this year’s pet sheep; he could not go out with the flock because of his sight.
Mrs Bennett still gave him a bottle. “He’s big for a pet, but he doesn’t see very well. You’re a blind old Blinkey, aren’t you?” as Blinkey tucked into his quart beer bottle of milk.
When he had finished, we set off in the Landrover.
Motutapu is large enough to forget that its coast is entirely circled with ocean. The soil is rich, black volcanic stuff and the pastures are good, while the farm carries eight thousand Romney breeding ewes and twelve hundred black Angus cattle. We drove down to Emu Bay beside a single file of Norfolk Pines. No one was living in the gabled cottage there; the garden had gone wild. Under the willows were tall clumps of yellow cannas and away up the hillside were drift upon drift of pink belladonna lilies, swaying on their garnet coloured stalks and filling the air with their sweet, over-ripened scent. We followed the road in another direction in a breathless cloud of dust and then turned across the paddocks when there was no more road to follow, startling skylarks and pelting flurries of starlings. Mrs Bennett showed me a lump of kauri gum she had found in a swamp we were passing and pointed out one straggling ricker left behind in a gully.
I asked the name of an unpleasant looking thornbush covered with hard little green apples. It looked as bitter as its name “Apple of Gomorrah.”
All the inhabitants of Motutapu have left some trace of themselves behind. The Reids left their belladonnas, the walnut trees and the Norfolks; the army, who were more recent, the remnants of their camps and batteries and heavy concrete doors which still lead mysteriously into hillsides. We drove down towards Pig Bay where the main encampment was and it looked as ugly as its name. The buildings have been empty longer than the naval barracks at Motuihe, the roofs are rustier and casual visitors have had more time to smash the windows and desecrate the walls. When the army started to dig down for their foundations, they uncovered remnants of another settlement, hearth stones, adzes, broken flints and slivers of bone, and, since the War, archeologists and geologists from the University have gone over the same ground. Painstakingly they have pieced together a fragmentary picture of ancient human occupation. As the relics they found were buried beneath a dense layer of volcanic ash, it is a picture which proves that men were living here about the 12th century, even before Rangitoto erupted into being. It is thought they must have been those wandering people, the Moa Hunters, who have left traces of their camps on the shores of the southern lakes and in other parts of both the North and the South Islands.
I looked along the bleak, unwooded shore, at the ruins of the camp, the thornbushes on the hillside with their bitter fruit, and tried to see further. I looked across the bay and imagined the sea, unbroken by Rangitoto, stretching between here and the mainland at North Head. The beach was bounded then with low white dunes and behind the dunes there was a fresh water lake. I wondered if it were in the rushes round that lake the hunters had stalked their quarry and if the moas had come down here to drink, printing the ooze with their long-nailed feet, their great necks bending and stretching.
Churlishly it began to rain, not hard but sadly. We drove back to the north-western coast as Mr Bennett was keeping an eye out for a missing heifer. You cannot put a fence round an island the size of Motutapu and occasionally an animal tumbles over. We did not find the heifer or hear it cry out, but there was a cast ewe which Mr Bennett set right side up and sent cantering off with a kindly slap on its woolly bottom.
“They’re not all as silly as they look, sheep” he said fondly and climbed back into his place. Not long after, I climbed out of mine to open a gate. I could write a treatise on gates and the variety of locks and chains and bits of wire and wooden bars I have wrestled with. Opening gates is the privilege that comes with the seat beside the driver. It can be very good exercise and if it is hung high and the road slopes down, you can swing at least one way.
We came to a pair which had not been closed for nearl
y twenty years. They were iron and they led to a long weedy drive and what had been the major battery on the island. There is very little more derelict than a modern place of war: there is no grace in the gaping socket of a gun pit, a steel mounting rusting in the grass, an iron shutter creaking on an empty bunker, its floor fouled with dirty newspaper and tobacco tins and the droppings of animals who wander in.
A little girl who had come ashore with us from the boat to see an island asked what all these things had been.
“Did we win?” she asked and then, “Why did we win?”
“Because we were right” someone told her.
“Who did we fight?”
“The Germans and the Japanese.”
“Were they all killed when they came here?”
“They never came.”
“Then was all this wasted? Did it end before I was born?”
“Twenty years” she repeated. “Oh, what a long, long time.” She looked at the fort from her small six-year eminence and it did seem a very long time indeed.
We were chasing phantoms round the island all afternoon. Then the rain stopped and we had one more ghost to raise. There was a village site not far from here, beyond a splendid grove of karaka trees — karakas are often a sign of former Maori occupation as they flourished in the shell middens which accumulated near a village. You could see shallow depressions where houses must have stood and we scratched about in the ground and found fragments of shell and sharp chips of obsidian. The village belongs to a time long before our wars and a few centuries after the Moa Hunters. Perhaps it was lived in when Endeavour sailed up the Gulf. The fortifications were very plain. A deep trench had been dug so sharply that the grass had never come back; only a single pohutukawa had sprouted, its roots exposed against the pebbly bank.
The trench surrounded a steep little hillock, ridged with terraces to its flattened summit that looked up the channel to the warlike north. The air smelt of pennyroyal. We sat there in the quiet of a place whose people have departed. It was busy once, the children calling out, the women singing in the kumara gardens, the men shouting down from hilltop to the shore. Now there were only the skylarks, the waves breaking on the rocks and the cicadas’ gentle hubbub in the grass.
Islands of the Gulf Page 7