It’s a dog’s life

Abby awakes

As one gets older it’s good to be greeted by friends one hasn’t seen for some time. Usually, they are human: this time it was a dog.

Remember the dog that switched on the television?

I was working at the computer out in our office, which is down the back of the section, when my step-daughter called. The first I knew was when the door opened and a large Golden Labrador raced in and madly greeted me with licks and beating of her tail on the carpet.

I hadn’t seen Abby for some time, but she remembered. While Gayle and Stephen were overseas for about six weeks last June we looked after their house, youngest grandson James and Abby. Abby and I got used to driving back to Paraparaumu every day or so and, after I had cleared my emails and done some work, we would go for a walk on the beach and she would find interesting things like half-decomposed fish heads and equally unpleasant but attractive objects the seagulls had left behind.

But she knew we went out to the office each time and she would curl up on the floor under my chair (much of her) and sleep while I worked.

Kay tells me she and Gayle arrived and Abby lead the way from the car to the kitchen. Then someone said: “Let’s go and see Bill”. Abby was out the door in a flash, down the path and to the office.

It’s nice to be loved, particularly by a dog one hasn’t seen for some time. I wonder if it is really me, or the superior kind of kennel I seem to spend my time in?

Putting it back together

One of the quirkiest court hearings I’ve ever struck turned up in our research for “Decade of Disasters”. It involved a charge of sheep stealing brought against a Chatham Islander and was heard in the islands’ magistrate’s court.

Man does not live by bread alone

A carcase of mutton, found hanging in the accused’s meat safe, was part of the evidence, together with a woolly sheep skin found hanging on a fence and a separated sheep’s head with the ears attached.

Now, when I was a boy and our source of meat was the weekly sheep my father killed on the farm, it was always impressed on me that when the skin was removed the ears had to be retained as an integral part. This requirement came from the old Stock Act, one of the first pieces of general legislation passed in New Zealand, that required the registration of ear marks that identified each farm. When lambs were tailed the ears are still notched with the registered farm mark. Retaining the ears with the skin meant, of course, there was an immediate proof of ownership, and its corollary of proof of sheep stealing.

The magistrate was also a part-time farmer, as was the accused and also the main witness. Only the policeman was not a farmer, although he, too, probably had to kill his own mutton.

The case proceeded with the magistrate leaving the bench and, with the accused, witness and probably a number of the public commenced an enthusiastic effort to prove or disprove the joining up of the head, skin and carcase on the court room floor. Proof was not possible, which is probably just as well as in the absence of refrigeration a guilty verdict might have resulted in an appeal to a higher court in New Zealand 500 miles away. There were no cameras in those days.

There is something about a book

We had a very successful book launch recently. Rhys Richards and I had put together a book compiled from the New Zealand National Library’s digistised collection of newspapers, concentrating on Chatham Islands reports over the 10 years from 1866 to 1875. We called it “A Decade of Disasters” as it covers a tumultuous period of the islands’ history.

Tumultuous it was. A major tsunami that was caused by a huge earthquake  in Chile far greater than the recent one that devastated Samoa and Tonga wiped out a Maori village and destroyed farm houses; epidemics of viral pneumonia and measles had a disastrous impact on an isolated population that had no immunity; the New Zealand Government imposed on the islands a penal colony for troublesome Maori who were held without trial or conviction; the first land claims were held through the Native Land Court, and; there were a number of shipwrecks, a couple of murders and a general exodus of most of the Maori back to Taranaki to establish their ancestral land claims there.

We drank a little wine, talked a lot with friends and family and were interviewed at length by a National Radio reporter who extracted about a couple of minutes worth for the national radio news programme this morning. Kay sat all the time at a table, selling copies of the book and a number of others that Rhys and I have written separately.

In a world that relies increasingly on Google, emails, twitters and texting, it’s somewhat satisfying to reflect that there is still a worthwhile place for the book. I use Google frequently to identify and access places and events, and even resource addresses. My emails have to be edited rigorously or I would end up with unnecessary megabytes of stored messages. I am rather fond of this blog, but I have to admit I don’t understand twittering and my arthritic fingers prevent me texting.

But I still love the printed word and a good book is a delight to take down from the shelf and greet again, like a friend who turns up unexpectedly for a cup of tea and a chat. The computer and four compatible programmes, Word, Photoshop, Pagemaker and Acrobat, have enabled desktop publishing of many small books like ours that do not compete with the mass production of more popular titles. And, in between those two extremes, there are many worthwhile books produced professionally that prove there is a continuing demand.

Long may that continue.

A flight down Memory Lane

It’s nice sometimes to look back through old photo albums (remember, we used to have these before we all bought digital cameras and kept all our images on hard discs or emailed them, and then forgot some of them should have been made into hard copies).

But many of the old albums also had plastic pockets

Kay climbs aboard

and sheaths and now, twenty or thirty years later, the plasticisers are wreaking havoc on the colour prints. Not all are affected in the 20 or so large albums Kay and I put together over the first 20 years we have been together.

It was while looking for a particular print to scan I found the photos I took on Kay’s 50^th birthday. One was badly damaged, but fortunately the better of the two is fine.

It was a great day to remember. The Sport and Vintage Aviation Society from Masterton brought their Harvard aircraft over to Paraparaumu and offered aerobatic flights as a fund raiser. Those of us who were pilots were able to log the 30 minute flights.

The flight was Kay’s 50^th birthday present and she still remembers looking up through the canopy and seeing the beach and the waves below.

The smile says everything!

Old man drinks wine, eats chicken, steals car

My father had a saying: “All cats look gray at night”, but that was in a different context I won’t introduce here. The other night I went down to Happy Hour at the Waitangi hotel and in the course of two and a-half hours I drank two glasses of white wine, ate a very substantial bar meal of Family Style Roast Chicken Dinner and had a number of extended conversations with various island residents and a couple of distant relatives who were visiting. It was a very dark night and when I left the bar

The Waitangi hotel in early morning light

to find my car there was no moon and no stars. My only guidance (having left my torch in the car) was a fresh breeze coming off the sea into my face and the knowledge there was a railing between the roadway outside the hotel and the sea. I carefully made my way along the row of dimly silhouetted parked vehicles until I recognized the outline of an Isuzu Bighorn. I got in, the key was in the ignition and it started with the familiar diesel rumble. I put on the lights and drove off. Driving up the road towards my house I was intrigued by a somewhat rough ride on the unsealed road. I had checked all the tyre pressures earlier in the day at George’s and made use of his compressor, but I was sure I hadn’t pumped the tyres so hard. Oh well, I could always check them again in the morning. I noticed also that the leather covering on the steering wheel had worn through the stitching in a couple of places, but it is, after all, not a modern vehicle. Back home I parked the car, got out and moved towards the house. A glimmer of light came through the clouds and for some reason I looked back. The car was a Bighorn but it was a different colour. I hastily got back in and drove to the hotel where the headlights soon illuminated my off-white car parked just behind where I taken the other. I made a quiet exit from the parking area and headed home again. You may ask why both vehicles had their keys left in them. We tend to do that in case someone needs to move them in one’s absence. A few nights later I was talking to someone who shall be known only as Jim. He readily agreed I had been particularly abstemious that evening and had noted I had changed from my usual large bottle of Speights to white wine, which is the usual tipple of our retired vicar Riwai. Jim inquired earnestly whether I had been “done” that night by our local policeman. I assured him that was not the case and told him the story. Jim responded by telling me the story of another resident who had perhaps been less abstemious and having taking his wife’s car to Happy Hour had returned and commented to her that her car was running roughly and needed attention. She replied that this was nonsense and demanded to know what he had done to her car. As he had gone to sleep in his chair by this stage there was no response forthcoming. She went out to inspect the car and found it was someone else’s. A phone call to the hotel soon established there was an owner of a white Subaru and, yes, it was no longer parked where it had been left. The message was passed and accepted that if her car was driven to her house the owner could have his car back. Her husband was not in a condition to drive again. It put me in mind of another Happy Hour story where a resident returning on the Monday from his annual leave that he had spent in New Zealand, elected not to return to work the next day but to spend it spring cleaning his house. As may be guessed, he is a bachelor. The cupboards were cleared and cleaned, the washing was brought up to date and, before he started on cleaning the stove he took a morning break sitting in the sun looking at the newly hung washing and enjoying a stubbie. Lunch followed a similar pattern and so did a break mid-afternoon. Just before five o’clock the house was spotless, the washing brought in and with feelings of achievement he decided to drop down to the hotel for a beer with his mates who by then would have finished the day’s work. On the way his car was stopped by the policeman who was conducting an education campaign on safety belts. He was invited to blow into the bag. His only comment was to express great resentment that he was surely the only driver to be unfortunate to be found over the limit on his way to the pub.

Homage to George Eastman

We owe a lot to George Eastman, whose simple Kodak Box Brownies and folding cameras enabled ordinary people to capture events and happenings that would never have been preserved by studios and newspapers. And there were also those men with cameras who worked the streets, catching shots of families and couples as they made their way from shop to shop or strolled through the public gardens on a Sunday afternoon when the brass band was playing in the rotunda.

Recently, I looked through a large suitcase of photographs collected by two generations of a cousin’s family after his death. I was able to identify perhaps a quarter of them by location

My grandparents and a shy five-year-old

and far less that 10 per cent of them by name. It’s sad so many of such photographs have been thrown out as grandparents have died and no sense was seen in keeping them.

George Eastman’s Kodak empire suffered a drastic fall as digital cameras became cheap and readily available, but he would have understood their rapid rise in popularity and even in the way the more immediate emails and cellphones have replaced the annual exchange of letters, cards and snapshots between families at Christmas.

I found a small photo of myself as a shy five-year-old with my grandparents, and another of my grandmother with a number of her grandchildren and their mothers. It was a sobering thought that there are only two of us left from those in that photograph.

More sobering was a Royal Air Force photo of the simultaneous burial of four young airmen (my uncle Maurice included) at Marham in Norfolk on 31 March 1943.

Uncle Maurice's burial 1943

Their aircraft on its first operation had been cleared for take off at the same time another aircraft was brought in to land on the same runway. The photo has an added poignancy in the snow lying on the ground and the bare-headed pallbearers in their greatcoats.

A few weeks later I was able to copy some snapshots from another family collection. This time I found a photo of my mother I had never seen before and a rare example of a family bereavement card for my great-grandmother’s sister who was born in 1842. At a time when telephones were few or non-existent, these cards were sent by grieving families to their friends and relations in other parts of the country and overseas.

Elizabeth Gregory (nee Hunt) born Pitt Island 1842

Last week I went to the funeral of a 90-year-old cousin in Christchurch, and within the last few days there have been two deaths on the island of much respected and loved elders.

Mum and Brian, Bill, Thelma and Ken, Muriel and Graham, Olive and Grandma at Melton Hills 1937

Emails and telephones have kept us all in touch, at times almost within minutes of critical events.

An island on an island

People who live on an island have an acute appreciation of their boundaries that are set by the sea, its beaches and the cliffs and sandhills. There is a feeling of security and familiarity, and a shared identity with the others who live with them as family and neighbours. There is

Fog rolls down my driveway

also an equally acute sense of the unknown in that world that is somewhere else.

Travel by air tends to truncate that separation, but to really feel the boundaries and the attraction of an island one should travel by sea. It gives the time to say farewell to one land mass falling behind below the horizon and then the first sight of the new land in the distance and its heralding by flocks of seabirds.

The Chathams are frequently characterized by misty skies and low clouds, with passing skiffs or rain and lines of squalls. In fact, the Moriori name for the islands is Rekohu, which means a land of misty skies.

But we can also wake to find the islands blanketed with fog, when the air is saturated and the moisture hanging in the air quickly settles on hair and beards, and clothing drips into open necklines and cuffs. At such times we are in our own little islands and the boundaries are a surrounding grey wall.

I watched one day the fog creep up the hill towards my house. Sheep and cattle and patches of bush blurred and then disappeared. Eventually, I could not even see the nearby house 30 metres away, and I was standing in the complete isolation of my own little island. It was an odd feeling of silence, without any sense of loneliness.

Then the fog began to thin and I could see a horse standing by a tree. An hour later the sun was shining in a clear sky, and the island’s boundaries again showed our separation from the rest of the world.

Time for a new header pic

 

I looked through my photograph files the other day to find a new picture to use as the header for this blog. I wanted something that expressed how I feel about the island, its people and its natural resources.

Low tide at Owenga

What better than the gathering of paua with a friend in a reserve that is agreed by the community to be kept free from commercial fishing.

It was a happy day. Kay and I had two friends, John and Liz, staying with us and we went for a drive to Owenga.

Liz and I crossed the rock platform at low tide to the pools at the edge of the reef where the ocean waves pound and the kelp on which the paua feed swirls back and forth. John kept his feet dry and took the photograph. We only needed enough for a meal of paua fritters — one each for the four of us — so why take more than we need!

That’s a lesson every Chatham Islander learns as a child: that, and also the traditional importance of sharing seafood with older members of the family.

Incidentally, when making a paua fritter, it helps to use breadcrumbs and not flour. The result is a much lighter fritter.

No one is ever too old plant a tree

The plum tree will take several years to prune to the desired fan shape

 

Recently, Kay and I went out to a nursery and bought a self-pollinating plum and an orange so that we could fill a couple of gaps in the back garden. We cut out an avocado when it became obvious it was not going to set fruit in our locality, and the other loss was a dwarf apple that produced a mass of very small fruit over the years and did not readily respond to heavy pruning.

As I planted the two trees I thought how it was possible I might not ever see them fruit and, even worse, that after my time some future owner of this section will see the orchard as an area on which another dwelling can be put. I can’t feel too strongly about that — after all, when we built our office in the back section we had to remove a couple of very nice nectarine trees.

We had visitors the other day and they (as good Aucklanders mostly are) were not used to seeing fruit trees in a garden at the back of a house. It was a time to think back more than 30 years when Kay and I first got together here and the house was new and on a bare section of wind-blown sand, without paths, fences or living plants. There was one exception that we did not know of, and that was a piece of cabbage tree root that had survived the bulldozer. It survived and grew mightily over the years.

For the rest, it was a case of miserable survival in those first few years. The fruit trees were planted in the lee of three bales of straw to stop them being blown away.

We put down paths and together with our neighbours, who were as modestly incomed then as we were, built fences but with gates between each section for quick access for borrowing tools.

Then there was the micro-farm — the self-sufficiency period when we had hutches of rabbits along one fence and guinea fowl and bantams in another area. The sand on the section benefitted greatly from the by-products, and from the trailer loads of crushed sheep dags and straw we brought in from weekend visits to the Manawatu and Wairarapa. Everything grew in profusion, once we realized how thirsty the sandy soil was.

We bought a large freezer and filled it; we traded rabbit carcasses for other goods, and; we bottled and preserved fruit and jam. Incidentally, we were both working, and when we found time to all those things I can’t imagine.

Getting back to the fruit trees, I’ve always been keen on growing apples and pears as espaliers. The trees are trained into fences running north and south with horizontal pairs of branches. It’s quite amazing how much fruit can be produced from a relatively small area.

For peaches and plums the espalier doesn’t work, but there is an alternative and that is the fan. The important time is that first year when the tree has to be convinced not to concentrate its effort on growing a central leader, and one has to be quite ruthless with the secateurs.

Finally, our grape vine that once lived in Christchurch, and a cutting was taken to Stokes Valley to grow there for 15 years before another cutting started at Paraparaumu. We grew the grape (and a number of others) in competition with Kiwifruit over a pergola, but the Kiwifruit was just too vigorous. The fruit was welcome and plentiful, but the pruning was laborious.

The grape readily took over the pergola and extended along the garage wall as well. Today, it has two main arms from a trunk that is over 100 mm thick. One arm is about 5 metres long and the other is about 11 metres. A good season gives us several barrow loads of fruit to share with friends and neighbours, as well as “Grandma’s Black Juice” — a cordial we make from grape juice and sugar and which is a very good base for a hot toddy in winter.

There are only two of us today, and some of the fruit production has been reduced. Our freezer is still full, but the home produce tends to be balanced by Pitt Island mutton and blue cod and groper fillets.

So yesterday we planted a couple of fruit trees. The orange is nestled into the lawn while the plum has been given its first lesson. The leaders were pruned back to three, with the centre cut back and the outer branches tied back under a gentle tension against the wires. In another month or so I will adjust the tension and pluck out any runaway shoots that are pointing the wrong way. If there are any little plums this year they will be plucked off so that the tree concentrates on growth. Next year, perhaps I will have a few plums to harvest.

May be in years to come some one will pick an orange or a plum and wonder who and why they grew that way. Who cares? One is never too old to plant a tree.

Heat pump happiness

When winter came this year we bought a heat pump. It has proved a Godsend in what has been a really cold winter. We have maintained a gentle background ambience that suits our ageing bones.

Mind you, while we were in Perth recently the family there rushed to switch on their heat pump because the

winter chills

 outside air temperature had dropped to 18 degrees Centigrade. Our idea of a gentle background ambience in a winter that has had several zero mornings is, in fact, a setting of 18 degrees!

But, while I have appreciated the warmth that has been brought inside the house by this machine, it has seemed such a waste not make use of all that extra cold air that is being blasted outside.

Today, I can truly say I am a conservationist. I had cooked a couple of crayfish that George had brought over from the island and as they were sitting cooling on the kitchen bench I had a brainwave. See photo!

winter chilled