On a further rise, a tiny figure was moving rhythmically up and down against dark swathes laid like a mosaic on the bleached pasture.
“That’s an old-fashioned sight” said Henry. “Someone slashing scrub by hand. Mostly they do it with a tractor now or just let it run.”
We bumped down a steep incline, opened another brace of gates and came out on a grassy flat with a big old house near the shore. It was the Hooks’ house; four square, with stout stone chimneys crowning the red roof, an outcropping of smaller buildings round a rectangular courtyard, tall white oleanders in flower, a nodding, eight-foot high crop of pill pink cosmos and a mulberry plopping its purple fruit on to the earth below.
Mr Hooks and his son Johnnie had left their heaps of ti-tree up on the hill. The kettle bubbled on the range.
I had met Mr and Mrs Hooks some time before at Captain Ladd’s office in Auckland and they had invited me to drop in if ever I were passing, so here I was.
“We’ve been looking out for you,” said Mr Hooks as he stirred his tea. His family, I knew, were among the first to come to the island.
“It’s not that long ago since my grandparents came. My grandfather was a soldier and fought at Rangiriri in the Waikato Wars in 1864. My great-grandfather came with them to Waiheke and he fought at Waterloo. He still had his old musket and his powder flask. When my Dad was a little chap Great-Grandfather Rawson used to tell him all about the battle.”
Mr Hooks described the day at Quatre Bras as if it were yesterday — the redcoats drawn up in embattled squares, the squadrons of cavalry, breastplates gleaming, the stench of powder, the shrieks of the horses, the roar of cannon.
“Things were going badly for us, then away in the distance they saw a cloud of dust. It was the Prussians coming. Blucher got there just in time, just in time.”
Mr Hooks was agile, strongly built with white hair, cheeks like apples and bright blue eyes that flashed with enthusiasm as he talked.
He told us about his grandmother running terrified up the hill when she saw a big canoe of Maoris landing on the beach, before the Waikato troubles were over. But they had called out “Wahine Hookey, come back. It is your friends who have come, not enemies” and so they were.
In 1869 when the Duke of Edinburgh came to New Zealand, HMS Galatea is supposed to have anchored in Man o’ War Bay. The Prince came ashore and Mrs Hooks entertained him in the kitchen. She used to tell her family how tall and handsome he was, and show them the mark to measure his height she had made on the kitchen door.
“That was another house — built right in front of a shingle bank; they hitched it up to a bullock team and pulled it down to the other end of the beach. Half Auckland was built with Waiheke shingle, there was always a scow loading in our bay.”
Mr Hooks told us that when he was a child a bit of kauri was still being cut and he recalled the phenomenal strength of Jack Twait, the bush boss. He was on his feet as he remembered the famous bushman and his twenty bullock team, how the whip cracked and the bullocks heaved (“He didn’t need to touch them with the whip more than a tickle. It was the noise that did it”) and the men running backwards and forwards from the creek with kerosene tins of water they sloshed in front of the log as it crashed through the undergrowth and hurtled into the water.
“Silver Bill, the cook at the camp, used to sneak us biscuits.”
I asked how long ago this would have been.
“Fifty, sixty years, maybe . . . no more than a puff of wind.”
We finished our tea. Henry suggested we had better be moving and Mr Hooks said the scrub would not be slashing itself on the hill, so we were off again.
During World War II the army built huge concrete gun emplacements and dug mole-like mazes of tunnels. We did some more subterranean exploring and the tunnels with their creaking doors swinging out from the hillside were more horrid than the manganese mine. They seemed to run for ever, branching to the left and right, and I recalled Tom Sawyer in the limestone caves and Injun Joe lurking in the shadows. What if we were lost, I thought, and never found the light and left our bones to moulder here? But we did escape and sat in the sun by a puriri grove filled with the diligent munching of a herd of heifers.
“Lunch” said Henry, and brought out a coffee flask, the sandwiches and the sugar sack full of papers, which had bounced in the back of the Landrover ever since we left Onetangi long before in the morning. Henry had acquired them some months before when a post office closed down. Since then rats had been gnawing and the survivors fluttered out in a storm of chewed confetti.
It was curious to sit on the warm grass going through papers of a family all of whom were dead. They could never have thrown away a docket from the grocer or a Christmas card and they must have taken summer boarders, as there were post cards, first with Victoria on the stamp and then Edward VII, requesting rooms on this date until that. There were lists of how many eggs the hens had laid and orders filled for them, letters from a married daughter, wedding invitations, clippings from the paper announcing birth or death. One of their daughters died young from consumption; in one letter she had a troublesome cough, then another said “she was not so well”; we read when she went into hospital and learned of her death from letters of sympathy bordered in black. There was a letter a little sister wrote to her in hospital.
Dear Lena,
I hope you will soon bee better. The cat has kittens and I have been tramping down the wool. They will finish shearring tomorrow.
Father is allong at the woolshed now and I wanted to go with him but he would not let me.
I want you to come home now and especially Mother. Tel Mother to bring me some Jujubes.
Tiny has to get up in the mornings to feed the things and I have to get up to feed the sitten hens.
I hav no more news to tell you.
From you lovings sister
Daisy XXX
The road here was built along a high shoulder and great black monoliths of rock were thrown about in the grass. Rabbits played hide and seek about them or stood like statues as we passed. Henry had a rifle lying along the windscreen and, when we came upon a rabbit standing bolt upright beside the road, he took his gun and fired. The bullet hit in a coughing cloud beside the rabbit’s haunch and the rabbit never budged. Henry fired again. The bullet slapped into the clay behind him and still the rabbit did not budge. A third shot went wide. The rabbit yawned, looked about and idly loped off into the bushes. Henry, rather irked, murmured something about cats having nothing on rabbits and put away his gun.
Mount Maunganui is the highest point on Waiheke and you can drive most of the way on a bulldozer track. It is high enough to look across to the Manukau Heads on the other side of the isthmus and to command a prospect of the Gulf that is poetic proof the world is round. You needed to revolve on a slow, complete axis so that you missed nothing, not the nearer islands, swart and solid against the molten silver of the sea, nor those further off shimmering beneath broad ribbons of dancing haze, nor the stacks of splendid clouds driven like chariots around the lip of the pale blue bowl of Heaven.
The only tree was a dead rewarewa, gaunt as a gallows, a few blackened leaves clamped to the branches. There had been a pa here once — you could follow the line of the terraces, see the house pits in the grass and shells embedded in the earth.
The next time Henry halted the Landrover, he led the way into an impenetrable waste of ti-tree; dusty beams of sun flickered through the branches and touched the springing coils of fern.
“Interested in graves?” he enquired, because we had come to a little cemetery and the trees were so dense we could barely stand. The mossy pickets had restrained the growth to a degree but they leant at drunken angles and the headstones, too. Not all the graves were marked in stone; some had a wooden cross and some not even that.
Henry looked about him, taking his bearings in the wilderness.
“The school was higher up the hill.”
And we climbed higher up the hill, heads down
for battering rams, the fine thorns of bush lawyer tearing at flesh and clothes. The school had been opened in 1880 and closed in 1930 because it had run out of pupils. According to a photograph it was an ugly little Gothic building, one of a standard pattern favoured by the Education Department of the day. All that remained was a puriri gate post and a rough clearing. Plantations of infant kauri and tanekaha were thick on the ground, feathery tendrils of lycopodium and little brown hedgehogs of moss, orange soldier flowers and the round blue bells of dianella. Henry paced out the boundaries and found the place where they tied up their ponies and where they stacked the logs for the fire. He told me about a Waiheke boy who became the opera singer Oscar Natzke. He went to a school down the other end and got expelled for climbing on the roof and spitting in the water tank.
“He only did it for a dare, but they expelled him just the same. His father’s buried in the cemetery back there.”
It was almost dark when we juddered down the last bit of road. “Told you we needed an early start” said Henry when he delivered me safe and sound at the Days’ farmhouse in Omaru Bay. He was affectionately scolded for being late and Dixie chivvied me off to a bath. I stretched my scratched and aching self in hot water and thought how much more satisfactory a bath can be when you are visibly and muddily dirty.
The Days are one of the oldest families on the islands and Uncle Ted is the oldest of the Days. “You could call me the Ancient of Days” he chuckled. He is eighty-seven, fine-boned, lively, with the acute memory of a countryman whose life has been deeply rooted in one place. We would take a couple of deck chairs down to the end of the garden, where it dropped abruptly to the beach below, and sit side by side near an old grey tree stump covered in lichen sprouting hundreds of vermilion seedheads.
Uncle Ted’s father, Martin, was an artilleryman who served with the 65th Regiment in the Maori Wars. He took his discharge in Auckland and he and his sixteen-year-old wife, Mary, came down to Waiheke and began to clear their grant of land. Mary bore eleven children and raised ten, four daughters and six sons. In his hoarse old voice, Uncle Ted mapped out the island he had known as a boy, setting down his family, their friends and neighbours in their valleys and bays. The Hodsons at Rocky Bay, the McIntoshes at Orapiu, the Ashwins and the Traces at Awaroaroa, the McLeods at Tematuka Bay.
“McLeod was very fluent in Maori and his wife always called him the Governor. Before he brought her down he told her he had fifty horned cattle on his land and he did, too, but they were wild goats.
“There were the Grays at Waiti, the Frasers and the Hooks in Man o’ War Bay and the Miss Waters and old Bill Hughes. He was a Crimean veteran and he lived in a hut full of cats. When I was a little feller he used to tip me to row out to the steamer and buy his whisky.
“Manuel was a hermit. He’d jumped off a whaler. He grew a bit of corn and the McLeods used to take him bread. When he got very old, some people took him up to the Old Men’s Home in Auckland. He had only one suit of clothes and it was patched and darned with flax so you couldn’t see what the stuff had been. He was dead in a few days, they said it was the change of diet killed him.
“I always ran” said Uncle Ted. “Never walked. Had to some days, with fifteen cows to milk before school. We always ran to school and we used to fill our bookbags with apples on the way. See that ridge back there” and he pointed up the hill. “They still call it Maggie Fraser’s ridge because she used to run up there every morning. She was the prettiest girl in the school.”
From what Uncle Ted told me, the island’s population was heavily laden with bachelors and spinsters. One family had five unmarried daughters.
“Well,” Uncle Ted remarked judiciously, “there were none of them what you’d call good-looking; in fact they were downright homely.”
He agreed there were a lot of bachelors. “They drank a good deal of rum, some of them, you’d see the empty bottles all about the bush, black bottles with a red heart on the label.”
He told me about a remittance man he worked with in the bush when they milled what was left of the timber. “His name was Bob Remington. His uncle was a Lord and they’d packed him out here because of the drink. He’d be all right for months and then he’d be off to Auckland for a spree. He always paid for every drink with a pound note and never took the change, couldn’t bear to take money from a barmaid, he said. He was the first chap I ever saw in the D. T.’s. I came down to the camp one morning and he was curled up in the fireplace. Cook said did I have any brandy, so I went home and fetched the bottle we kept for medicinal and he sat up and begged for it. I was going to give him half but he took the lot at one gulp. And he was good as new then.” Uncle Ted chuckled. “Almost as good, anyway.”
The worst times were when people were ill and there was no chance of help. They learnt bush remedies from the Maoris; pukatea bark for toothache, ti-tree berries for a sick stomach, seared thistle leaves wrapped round burns and the jelly inside rewarewa bark was good for healing a wound.
“We always had plenty to eat. We grew most of it, and shot wild pigeons. There was fish, and mussels and oysters all over the rocks.”
Only their staples were ordered from Auckland and they were sent up in a cutter.
“There must have been twenty or thirty cutters coming to the island — the Tay, the Janet, the Sovereign of the Seas — the one that Caffrey the murderer hi-jacked. Steamers were coming and going all the time from Coromandel. One of the smartest was the Queen of Beauty. The captain was a mining man and he wore a diamond clasp on his tie. We used to have a big regatta here at Cowes Bay. It was packed in the summer, ferries bringing picnic parties by the thousand and bands playing on the beach.”
He told me of his mother playing the accordion on the verandah in the evening, the smell of new-baked bread. “Mum said it was all in the kneading and she used to save her yeast by slicing off a bit of dough from one baking and keeping it in the flour barrel to use to leaven the next. Dad brewed mead from wild honey, so clear it was and golden, and he only brought it out on special days, like Christmas. A ham always came with the Christmas order from town and packets of conversation lollies, little pink things with sayings printed on them like ‘Roses are Red’. We got our presents — a wooden doll for the girls and we boys got a pocket knife, perhaps. Tri-Mees, with the steel handle, were the best knives.
“We never had a Christmas tree at home. They had one up at the school — Henry showed you where that was — and one year we were going to have a Christmas Tableau and I was to be Boy Blue. Mum made my suit from a blue satin petticoat. A girl was to say the poem while I blew my horn, but some of the children were too shy and didn’t learn their words, so the teacher cancelled it. It’s eighty years ago, but I still feel how that disappointment smarted. Christmas was always the best time. The puddings would be hanging in their cloths and on a big high shelf in the kitchen were six square bread-tins with the Christmas cakes inside. We kids used to stand on our stools to smell them.”
Uncle Ted’s mother was drowned when he was thirteen.
“She loved to go fishing down on the rocks after tea, and when it was getting dark, I used to fetch her home. One evening she went as usual and when I went down to the rocks she wasn’t there. I ran round the point to the Frasers’ — she often visited them — but she wasn’t there either. I ran up over the cliff path calling and calling, but I got no answer. She was lost without a trace. We thought a wave must have come and washed her away. It was the loneliest time I ever remember, running up the path in the darkness calling and calling her name.”
Just then Dixie summoned us for lunch and before we went inside Uncle Ted told me about a young man, a summer visitor, who had asked how he put up with being stuck on an island all year round.
“Well, I told that young fellow what he did instead. Swing on a strap in the bus every morning, sit in an office all day perched on a stool with nothing to see but the wall in front of you, and then swing on another strap going home. Now me, I said, there’s not an ho
ur of the day when I’m out on the hill I don’t see a bird or a flower or a boat passing. You can have your prison and swinging on a strap; I’ll have my island.”
* * *
The weekend Don and I went down to Ponui was the last time I visited the Days. Mr and Mrs Fred Chamberlin had brought us over in their launch to Omaru Bay and, in the garden, Holy Communion was to be celebrated, just as it had been the year before. It was the week before Lent began and Dixie had cherished her garden through a drought. John Powell, who had succeeded Bob Hansen as vicar, had come down the new road, not by water, and so had most of the congregation who were not so numerous as last year because all the summer people had gone.
The altar, a little table, with two legs propped against the slope of the lawn with Trevelyan’s Social History of England and a stack of Digests, was spread with a fair white cloth exquisitely starched and ironed. The vicar set down on it a silver crucifix and the bread and the wine. Then he lit the candles, but the sun blotted out the frail light of their flames. Down in the bay a fisherman drowsed in the stern of his dinghy, a slack line over the side, the hydrofoil sped by on its double-winged wake and somewhere I could hear the gnat-buzz of an amphibian. Off the further coast a line of yachts was racing. If you looked hard enough, you might have seen a cutter with patched brown sails coming in for firewood, a steamer gold-rush-bound for the Thames, or a great canoe with carven prow and the sharp paddles slicing the water.
The Processional hymn was “Praise my Soul the King of Heaven” and the Epistle was Paul’s words to the Corinthians, “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.” The words of the service gleamed with the constancy of use like thin old coins; the words of comfort, of exhortation and of forgiveness, the prayers for Christian kings, princes and governors, the prayers for God’s Majesty. I thought how many times they had been uttered and in how many places and now on a little promontory on a little island.
Islands of the Gulf Page 27