Bernie Gunn ‘Reminiscences’

Bernie Gunn’s ‘Reminiscences’ is compiled of a collection of typed documents, comprising of his memories from the 1920’s and 30’s. The documents were gifted to the Upper Clutha History Society in 1995.

Minor edits have been made to spelling and grammar. All place names have been left as they were written, meaning macrons have not been included and Albert Town appears as it was originally written - Alberttown

Bernie provided titles for some but not all chapters. Chapter 9 is missing from our records and there are two Chapter 12’s.

• Chapter 1 - Introduction

  The first century of our country's existence as a western nation, more exactly the period between 1855 and 1955, is too recent to be history, too long ago to be remembered by more than a few, too well-known to have any aura of romance and especially in the South Island is almost unrecorded except for the effects of "Gold Rushes," "The War" and "The Depression" all of which affected fewer lives than one might imagine. Yet even in 1920 as men returned from the Great Holocaust to take up their lives again, it was, at least in country areas, to a way of life changed only in minor respects from not only pre-renaissance Europe but even from Roman times. The 'Peasantry' were almost entirely self-supporting, what foodstuff they might grow on their patch of soil was largely what they ate, if a man grew well, he ate well, if he did not he and his family were likely to go hungry. To a generation which assumes that the local shopping mall exists to supply all possible food, clothing and entertainment such self-dependence is unimaginable. Our world of even sixty or seventy years ago was bounded by the not-so-distant hills, what lay beyond them only a few knew apart from the returned soldiers and the immigrants, and fewer cared. One read in books of tropical fruits such as bananas, pineapple, mangos, durian, or breadfruit, but it did not cross our minds that there would come a day when we might see them on our own tables.

  The world, we mainly knew, was round, there were other countries, mainly barbaric, the rare visitors even from England were strange people with ridiculous accents and who wore ridiculous clothes, they were inevitably physically inept and rarely possessed the most elementary skills, one could take it for granted that no foreigner could so much as shoe a horse or milk a cow. Consequently we envied them not and to be truthful, despised them not a little.

  Houses, boats, and roads were still built by eye, as they had been for the past few thousand years, water races were dug with the aid of home-made water levels, walls were built with the aid of a plumb-bob and a marked length of wood as I have seen them built more recently in Tibet. Rules and tapes and surveyors chains were known but were seldom seen. One of the handsomest vessels on Waitemata Harbour is the trading schooner "Breeze" built on a Coromandel mudflat by old Ralph Sewall with an adze, a brace and bit and a plane. Her lines are impeccable, "what looks right, must be right" as a shipwright once said to me, no matter what a rule or computer plan may say to the contrary… Much was simply "known." Thus everyone knew that poliomyelitis was caused by sun on the back of the neck and could be prevented by wearing hats, that tuberculosis was cured in a climate with dry air. Unfortunately authorities in far-off Dunedin also believed this and sent their patients to Central Otago to spread the disease. Hare lips were caused by pregnant women being frightened by a rabbit, people of odd mannerisms had been "touched," and though belief in The Little People was not common we avoided black cats like the plague. Rheumatism could be cured by rubbing kerosene on the stiff arm and Stockholm Tar had quite magical qualities. Water could be divined by a bent willow twig, Chinese knew where gold was and Finns could troller wind. A red sky in the morning was a shepherd’s warning and thunder was caused by the air splitting apart, though some children (and quite possibly adults) believed thunder to be the rumble of chariot wheels over the sky as I did, a belief which must date back four thousand years. Thunder does in fact sound very like a wagon passing over an overhead wooden bridge. Children also firmly believed in the Pot of Gold at Rainbows End and we stalked rainbows with fierce concentration. Old women might have the "Evil eye" and we were terrified of them. Some elderly and no doubt harmless old women could scatter the local children like chickens by pointing an arthritic finger.

  All children were aware of folklore which had been passed down from Grandmother to Grandchild for a thousand years or more, of Bruce and the Spider, of King Alfred burning the cakes of the peasant woman, of King Knut ordering back the tides, tales which are certainly not found in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle or in history books. Sir Launcelot, Sir Gawain (or Gavin), even the less-than-perfect Sir Kay, and others were to us very real people as were Ajax, Achilles, Odysseus, Paris and King Priam and it is odd to find a younger generation who have never heard of them. After all, Achilles chose a short and noble life on the promise of Athena that his name would be remembered forever as he has been for 2460 years!

  The end of the known world lay only thirty miles to the west beyond the visible line of impassable mountains where the maps of the day were labelled "Unexplored". I was quite surprised at the age of twenty to find that the Alps had been crossed by Hector and von Haast, Hector's crossing of Hectors Col at the head of the Matukituki into the Waipara and the Arawhata was not well known. We knew of that famous old miner-prospector-explorer, "Arawhata Bill" but not of where he had gone and the name of Barrington was unknown. Somewhere beyond the snow and bush we knew was a lot of water called "sea", to the south it grew cold and there were whales, to the north, hot and steamy and there were unpleasant islands where naked savages roamed and we wanted little of either. That one worked as long as daylight and life lasted was taken for granted, an educated person was one who could read and write and add numbers, a talented person could play the squeeze-box, fiddle, pipes or piano, and that a live human being needed to be entertained except by earnest conversation was not a concept we had encountered. I was eighteen years old before I reached the city of Christchurch, a noisy, dirty jumble of buildings with packed pavements and streets congested by trams, bicycles and people who did not stop and speak and I thought the life of a dog preferable to theirs. I was twenty before I saw the city of Queenstown forty miles away, and I was not impressed by it very much either though it was little bigger than Pembroke. It was winter and I walked over the Crown Range in the snow, and the potholes in the streets were frozen and the dining room at "Eichardts" was chilly.

  That period of time, especially between 1925-55 saw the transition from a life style not so greatly different from the previous three or four millennia, to a life-style without boundaries, with distance rendered almost meaningless, without community obligations, without independence, without more than elementary family ties and without the respect of one’s neighbours. As no such rapid social change has taken place before in the last five thousand years, perhaps it should be better recorded. It was perhaps typical of the upset of progress that I could ride a horse before I saw a bicycle and fly an aeroplane, before I could drive a car, or had even been in one more than a dozen times. My mother saw Bleriot fly across the English Channel, my father was in one of the last great cavalry charges and we thought that a kerosene lamp was an amazing invention. I slowly accepted that kerosene was a liquid itself, not just something dissolved in water but how there could be other liquids than water baffled me sadly.

  Folk history is more important to us than the dry facts of history books, yet it becomes thin with time. I have spoken with a man who remembered Te Kooti and the Māori wars, with another whose grandfather was a cannibal, with another who had spoken with a man who remembered Boney. Threats of "Boney will get you" were still heard directed to naughty children and we sang a lusty song at school,

  "Boney was a warrior, way yay ya,
  Boney was a warrior, Jean Francois,
  Boney has gone back again, way yay ya,
  Way to Saint Helena, Jean Francois!"

  though it took me many years to work out what "John France Wa" might be, in fact it was not till I went to France and found that "Jean Francois" was the soldier nickname for the French enemy, like "Fritz" or "Jackie" or "Johnny Jappo" and our teacher explained that when Boney went "'board the Billyruffian", that this was sailors slang for HMS "Bellerophon", which seemed logical. Present day school children have not heard of Napoleon, or the Billyruffian, nor can they sing and they seem little better for the lack.

  Hardened old Scots whose great-great grandfathers had been "out" in the Forty-five, were reduced to tears by our childish renderings of "Bonny Charlie's Gang Awa’", and so entrenched is the feeling of sadness entrenched in the name Culloden, that though I have often been in Inverness I cannot force myself to visit the site of the battlefield. One grew up with the unspoken belief that on that fell day romance and freedom died, being carried over the seas to Skye and the gay days when one wore the kilt and carried a claymore and called no man "master” went with the "King over the water". To this day when drinking a toast I sometime pass a glass over the water carafe and see a fleeting smile on the faces of Scots present. Beyond that and before Culloden our knowledge of our origins was truly "lost in the mists of time".

• Chapter 2

  Like most of our neighbour’s children, I was born in our own home, a typical Highland stone cottage, on the banks of the Clutha River in what is known as Central Otago or Strath Clutha, in a small island country in the South Pacific, called New Zealand. Geologically speaking, if one wishes to be pedantic, the name is something of a misnomer, it being not very new as some of its rocks were laid down about 450 million years ago when the land was a wandering splinter of the great Gondwana Continent. There was land here when dinosaurs roamed and our mountains have seen the great ice-ages come and go so "new" it is not.

  "Zealand" is the flat island upon which Copenhagen stands, and "Zeeland" is a mudflat in the Netherlands, and one suspects that that hardy and enduring old navigator, Abel Janzoon Tasman had the latter in mind when he sighted at noon, "a land uplifted high" dead ahead, in the year 1742.

  Our cottage was of a type commonly seen in Scotland north of Inverness, being of stone, with walls three feet thick, with a door on one side and two symmetrical windows. Untypically, there was a second story with a window either end.

  "And what," you may well ask, "Is a typical Highland crofters cottage doing in such a far-off land, even one with the guid Scots name of Strath Clutha?". And well you may. Just as in the days of Rome, as the Empire grew, colonies were established all over the known world, colonies and cities where pensioned soldiers could be settled, agricultural colonia which could supply grain and wine to the ever-growing capital, and supply soldiers in time of war. In barbaric lands, at Leptus Magna in Tripoli in Africa, at Timgad, at Ephesus in Turkey were built copies of Rome, with a marble-columned forum, a theatre, paved streets, statues to Mercury and Diana, copies of the Arch of Hadrian, massive aqueducts, and public baths.

  The British Empire was culturally a rather feeble imitation of the Roman one, great cities were founded but with few magnificent copies of Westminster, Marble Arch or London Bridge, English colonies were more characterised by cheap wooden houses and Administration buildings which could be quickly erected. But in a similar fashion ex-soldiers were transported to settle far-off lands, and agricultural colonies were established which could supply grain, wool (and later, frozen mutton) to the millions of London as well as providing soldiers in time of war.

  As agriculture improved in the home country, it was found that the colonies were no longer needed or could no longer be supported, and like Leptus Magna, and a colony called Albion, they were abandoned to be ultimately over-run by barbarians. It is one of the marvels of the world to find in this far away land, buildings with Grecian Ionic columns, Gothic arches in mediaeval cathedrals, unmistakable Roman-arched bridges, places of learning with Refectory tables and baroque clock-towers, and to see sports teams battling over symbolic Shields.

  Georgian Manors, Tudor mansions, and even lowly Highland crofts stand between wooden villas which are recognisable copies of brick working-class English tenements. We did it less well than the Romans, and used rather less marble, but our last two-thousand years of culture is still about us.

  The Greeks believed that Gods could see where Man could not, so an entire temple or statue must be built of the best marble. Romans, more cost-conscious, built of concrete and faced with marble. We, more cost-conscious still, build in concrete only.

  Here statues of Queen Victoria and Governor Grey are to be found rather than of Augustus Caesar, or Antoninius Pius, though equally often despoiled by the hordes of passing Goths and Vandals. It is a comfort to believe than in a thousand years a good archaeologist will be able to guess our origins.

  The first European to behold the great mountains and grassy terraced plains of Strath Clutha was one, Nathaniel Chalmers, an adventurous young man by all accounts. While being ferried across the Mataura River in Sutherland by an elderly Māori called Te Reko, he heard the story of how Reko, a member of the Kāi Tahu tribe (who had invaded the South Island from the North perhaps two centuries before) had escaped massacre by a second wave of invaders, the Ngāti Toa and their sanguinary leader, Te Rauparaha.

  Escaping the flames of Kaiapohia Pa near Christchurch, Te Reko had made his way by the inland route of the Mackenzie Country and the Lindis Pass, crossing the Clutha River possibly by raft and the Kawarau by the "Natural Bridge", and made his way to the relative safety of Southland. Whether he came alone, how he knew such a route existed, how he survived over four hundred miles of virtually treeless country with a few eels and fewer ducks, we shall never know.

  "Oh, yes!" said the elderly Reko, "There is a lot of open grass country to the north. I can show you, you give me an iron pot!"

  For the price of an iron pot, Chalmers made a remarkable journey, up the Mataura River, over The Nevis and the Cairnmuirs and the Natural Bridge, passing by present-day Lowburn to the Hawea. There by the lake, starved and exhausted, he could go no further. His two companions were made of sterner stuff and lashing together a "Moggie" made of bundles of light claddie stalks, they allegedly rafted the entire river for a hundred and fifty miles to Balclutha.

  The curse of Cromwell on Nathaniel Chalmers! The human interest in a story of the tribulations of man is often in inverse proportion to the recording of it, and Chalmers gave only verbal accounts. How did they navigate the Rattlesnake Bend, and Devil's Elbow where many a lumber raft came to grief twenty years later, did they really shoot the Boiling Pot near Cromwell, straight? Again we shall never know.

  Chalmers’ stories of great sprawling grasslands however must have raised enormous interest among prospective settlers and it was not long before the surveyors Vincent Pike and Thomson were triangulating the country. Hard on their heels with bullock wagons and sheep came the new runholders. Wilkin and McLean, it is said, crossed the Lindis and ascended the Grandview Range to gaze over the whole strath, to the distant lakes and the snow of the main range. Perhaps like Vincent Pike, they saw the summit of far-off Mount Aspiring. "You take the far side of the river, laddie," McLean is supposed to have said, "and I'll take this side!"

  This was well enough for Mclean for with some pick and shovel a bullock wagon could be brought in from the coast at Oamaru, via Omarama and the Lindis Pass but Wilkin's run lay on the far side of the formidable Molyneux or Clutha river that drains the great lakes, Oanaka (Wanaka) and Hawea. But later, he was to find, less than three miles below Lake Wanaka, a possible ford at Albert's Crossing, the only ford in the entire two hundred miles of the Clutha.

  McLean made his homestead at Morven Hills, surrounded by rippling tussock grass, on the widening flats of the Lindis River and between the flat-topped Dunstans and the Grandview Mountains. Morven and the local Ardgour and Tarras are all names from the western Highlands near Mull, though of the two, while the Lind is Valley has more flat land and grazing, it is the more desolate in the drying summer, at least now when so much of the grass has gone after a century of sheep and rabbits. Perhaps then it appeared like a sheepman' s paradise!

  Albert's crossing is a scant quarter-mile from my birthplace and I have forded it on foot, when the river was very low indeed. To the experienced river eye, the shallow depth means speed of flow, the lack of ripple a bottom of hard packed rock, not mere gravel for the Clutha, look you, as the Welsh say, is a power in the land and not one of your wandering, feeble, muddy little creeks like the Thames. It is a fast, onflowing, self-important, controlled cataract, pouring swift and quiet between its great Pleistocene shingle-terrace banks, over rocks and through gorges, with water so clear one can count the stones on the bottom, water as cold as the snows it comes from.

  Dive under the surface and hear the rattle of the moving stones, put the bow of your canoe into a whirlpool along the line of a backeddy and be spun like a top, enter a rapid with waves shoulder high, shoot the cascade between rocks and be flung out onto roiling green shining water, dig in the paddle at exactly the right moment, lean hard against the current and there, you rest in a calm motionless backwater while yards away the river roars on.

  Swiftly flows the Rhine but tamely, even at the Lorelei, the Ganges is but a vast muddy sewer, though a very holy one, the St Lawrence has power and, when its banks are lined with maple, birch and spruce, a certain prettyness, but even in the Lachine or Trois Riviere rapids there is not the power of the Clutha.

  Once, to digress a little, when the St Lawrence was in flood at the time the ice goes out, my daughter, aged nine, went for a paddle in a little old bateau and was soon being carried away among the ice-floes, the water was dam' cold and as I swam after her the thought crossed my mind (I being somewhat a coward) that it would be a silly place for a member of the Antarctic Swimming Club to drown. But then I got the feel of the water, lazy, not aggressive and the water in truth was little colder than the Clutha in August in spite of the three-foot thick floes. Soon I was aboard and rowing her home.

  "We brought the waggins acrost the river there" said old Grandfather Morris to me as a child pointing to the Crossing with the stem of his cherry pipe. "And young Willie Smith (wrong name) was washed off 'is 'orse and drowned!" 

  Carved in a quartz schist river rock at the cemetery opposite the stone cottage, are the words "Wm. Smith, drowned in River, 1868". Many other stones have a similar epitaph.

  Wilkin must have been vastly relieved at having crossed the river, for he established the headquarters of the Wanaka Station on the terraces close by the ford and in 1858 a row of three stone cottages, a cookshop, and a store were built near the bank, a great wooden woolshed on the terrace above and a wooden house surrounded with hundreds of lombardy poplars which still stand to the great joy of artists in the fall, or did until a recent developer with more eye to a quick profit than to history, felled most of the grand old trees. All the lumber was pit-sawn, either in the Matuki Valley or at Makarora and was rafted down the lake and river. The 10x2 heart white-pine ceiling rafters of the Stone Cottage are as sound as the day she was built. Let gales blow where they will and snow fall, but the old cottage will last many a century yet. Wilkin soon sold the property (which extended from the Head of Lake to the Junction at Cromwell a distance of about seventy miles), to Henry Campbell but several of the Campbell family reputedly died of typhoid, a result of taking their drinking water from a spring down the terrace below their house and below their pit-toilet. Presumably a typhoid carrier must have visited.

  About the year 1911 the old Station was broken up and many of the old Station workers acquired farms. A reduced Wanaka Station was bought by Sir Percy Sargood and a new homestead built amid stands of oak and sycamore by Lake[ Wanaka] with a lovely curved tree-lined driveway. This was destroyed by fire about 1922 and about the same time a block of about 600 acres at Alberttown and including Campbell's old site was put up for sale.

  My father was born in Bedfordshire, England as his father and grandfather had been also. Clan Gunn are of Norse origin but when Snowy (Snaekollr) Gunn cut down his cousin John, Earl of Orkney in Thurso in the 11th century, the Gunns lost the Earldom of Orkney, and Snaekoll moved to Caithness where his wife had inherited large estates. On cliffs above the sea near Clyth, he built Castle Gunn, some ruins of which are still to be seen.

  As quarrelsome, blue-eyed Norse interlopers the Gunns were never liked by their neighbours, the McKays, Keiths, Mclvors and Sinclairs. With bow and arrow, claymore and targe the Gunns defended their lands for five hundred years though they could seldom put more than two or three hundred men in the field and though they virtually exterminated the Keiths when attacked by them at the orders of the Earl of Caithness, (a Sinclair), the Sinclair’s pressed them south until they became a client clan of the powerful Sutherlands, on the borders of Ross-shire. Disarmed since Culloden after which it was a hanging matter to carry a dirk, they were betrayed by the Countess of Sutherland in 1816 who was persuaded that she, married to one of the wealthiest men of the day, could be even more wealthy than he if the crofters were driven forth and their place taken by sheep. Her creature, Patrick Sellars with a gang of armed men fired the crofts, as many as three hundred in one night and when the Gunns moved to burn Dun Robin, the picturesque castle of the Sutherlands, a detachment of army with cannon and grape moved north.

  The starving Gunns threw up temporary stone and sod shelters above the sea-cliffs at a desolate spot called Badbea, near Helmsdale where the ruins may still be seen. Children had to be tied that they might not fall over the cliffs. It is said "The Countess found Sutherland a garden and she left in desert!”

  From there, the Gunns dispersed to the four corners of the globe, via Hudson Bay to Winnipeg, to America and Australia.

  A second wave of immigration to New Zealand occurred in the gold-rush times of 1880's including the family of David Gunn of Hollyford fame.

  Many Gunns became mercenary soldiers, one Marcus Gunn who soldiered in Europe, settled in Norfolk and his son moved to close by where my Great-grandfather was born and has the same name, so there is a possible connection. Our family origins are confused by the many spellings of names translated from Gaelic, the fact that only a few Christian names were used (Alistair, George, Donald, William, Thomas) and the many septs. Thus the Wilsons are descended from a William Gunn, the Hendersons from Henry Gunn, the Mansons from Magnus Gunn, the Robsons from Robert Gunn and so on. Arthur Wilson, mentioned here, came from a Caithness family and was almost certainly a distant cousin. It is even claimed that those of the name Wiley (of whom more anon) are a sept of Clan Gunn! There was also much intermarriage with the Rosses, Sutherlands, MacKays, and even Sinclairs. Today the moorlands north of Braemore are deserted, Castle Gunn is a ruin, the stone foundations of Dirlot Castle rises above the Thurso river in a wild and lonely spot amid the heather, old cemeteries carry the recurring names of many Thomases and Alistairs, (the latter being the name of my eldest son) and Donalds, Davids and Georges. Unbelievably, the shooting and fishing rights are still owned by wealthy English and even Arabs!

  [Writing in the column says ‘check] At the Highland Games at Helmsdale, we were recently startled to hear; “And the shot-put of fifty-seven feet six inches was just won by Alistair Gunn!” and a tall young man with the recognisable fair hair, blues eyes and craggy features of a Gunn stepped forth. Last summer my daughter-in-law Diana Gunn stayed for a night at a B & B in Latheron, the centre of Clan Gunn.

  "I am so pleased to welcome you," said the hostess. "My name is Diana Gunn too!"

  My father, Thomas Gunn, left England for West Australia in 1904, went through the Gallipoli campaign with the Australian cavalry, returned to England and married my mother who had been a theatre Sister in St Mary's Hospital throughout the war. They migrated to New Zealand in 1922, and after a year in the Spring Creek, Blenheim area, took up six hundred acres of the old Wanaka Station land near Albert’s Crossing, the only building still standing being a stone cottage built probably for a married couple on the Station. After a thousand years of blood and toil it must have seemed little enough.

• Chapter 3

  "Aye," said my mother once, reflectively while standing at the door under the honeysuckle and staring at the distant gaunt brown hills seared by the late summer sun and the wind. "Aye, ye're a hard land. Just like the people!"

  "The People" would almost certainly have smiled complacently at the compliment. Especially in Pre WW2, there was no more contemptuous or derogatory assessment than to be labelled "Soft". To be Soft suggested one was weak, vacillating, incapable of physically or mentally dealing with the hard knocks fate dealt out with monotonous regularity, knocks which real men shrugged off with a scowl and a curse at most, more often with dour indifference. Father allowed himself one appalling oath used only when the world came to an end, "God save the Duke of Argyll!"

  It rather puzzled me until I learnt more of Highland history and the role of the Whig Clan Campbell, the head of Clan Campbell being the Duke. In sheer obscenity, it was akin to a Jew declaiming "May God save the soul of Adolf Hitler."

  Though the pioneers were often far from illiterate, hardly a word has been preserved of the conditions under which they lived and worked except for the works of a few such as Samuel Butler, but a man who could transport a piano by dray into the Erewhon sod shanty was hardly typical! Many of the neighbouring farms were originally formed by a man who came as a goldminer, humping his swag, pintpot in his hand, shovel on shoulder, and who had presumably accumulated enough ounces of the yellow metal during the seventies to buy timber, set up a house, buy fencing and stock. Others had "come up from the coast" before the Gold Rush, and often had to suffer seeing their useful sons leave home to join the stampeding miners.

  Most of our neighbours were Lowland Scots, though they preferred the word "Scotch", the other being thought sissy. Highlanders do not mix well with Lowlanders, nor with the few English, while, some, God save us all, were Irish and Catholic at that. The Irish had odd names like Macatamney, had many children with large freckles and were inevitably poorer than most. While no one would speak a word against a Catholic openly, nevertheless they were from beyond The Pale. Once Mother announced her intention of visiting a woman in Pembroke.

  "She's Cath'lic, y'know, Missus Gunn," warned another woman present. Mother drew herself up. "I don't care if she is," she stated with freezing finality. "I find her a very Worth While Person!" To Victorians, to be a Worth-While-Person, always pronounced in capitals, outweighed all social and racial disadvantages. One day Lady Sutherland-Ross visited in her dark majestic Bentley (or perhaps it was a Rolls!). Lady Sutherland-Ross was a long term friend and patron, I more than suspect that she was well aware of the historical relationship between Sutherland, Ross and Gunn. Now it chanced that Mother was entertaining a local Rabbitter's wife named Cannon, a gaunt, harsh-voiced woman dressed in awful purple.

  "She's a bit of a weird old ossity," Mother once admitted "but a Worth-While-Person for all that." Now Lady Ross well knew that this rather strange figure would not be in our house were she not more than she seemed and Victorians accepted each other’s judgments. She drew off her elbow-length white glove and extended a warm hand.

  "How are you my dear? I am so pleased to meet a friend of Mrs Gunn’s," and the disparate trio sat down to the elaborate Victorian afternoon tea ceremony as though social class never existed. By 1950, a mere century after the first Europeans arrived, differences of origin had faded and something of an integrated community was beginning to be formed only to be destroyed by the influx of strangers due to the internal combustion engine.

  The people "who came up from the coast" in the 1858-70 era tended to be interrelated, but by the 1920's there were few of the original wagoneers left alive. Grandfather Morris had been a mere boy when his parents arrived at the Dunstan Diggings, indeed he was claimed to have been the first child on the goldfields. He had lost an eye in a shooting accident and was a gaunt dignified old man always with a cherry pipe in one hand and a blackthorne stick in the other. He was, as his daughter, Mrs Templeton (who is now 90 herself) said to me lately, "As old as the hills, had always been there and always would be." It never seemed possible that such an indestructible old man would not live for ever, but now he is gone and we must guess at what may have happened to his generation on the wagon-trail.

  The Lowlander immigrants were mainly from Robbie Burns country in Galloway and Dumfries, Mount Criffel a few miles from present day Wanaka being named for a similar hill in Dumfries. I was recently in Dumfries and could not but laugh at the familiar expressions and attitudes, they could have been some of our old neighbours and of course were almost certainly related had we gone into a bit of genealogy. They arrived by sailing ships such as the "Nelson" which made the record passage across the Indian Ocean to Port Chalmers. How they reached Oamaru I do not know as there could not have been much of a track over Purakanui and the Kilmog, perhaps by coastal scow. One can imagine several families assembling wagons and bullocks, cattle and riding horses, a few sheep but sheep could be bought from the Campbells or McLean at Morven.

  The careful loading of sacks of flour, seed potatoes, carrot seed, maybe cabbage, the local blacksmith hammering out tools, axes, hammers, shovels. Roofing iron for the first house, possibly brought from Britain, fencing wire, nails, spare clothing, rope, a plough, harrows, a wash tub, extra camp ovens and dixies, kerosene for lighting till the wagons become top-heavy. "The rest can wait till next year!" Perhaps a wagoner would contract to carry some of it.

  The final departure would be delayed till late Spring when the distant snows had crept up the mountainside and new green grass grew along the trail. We can imagine the last tearful goodbyes, the hard handshakes, "God go with ye all! " the whips cracking, "Gee, there!" to the bullocks, the wagon wheels slowly grinding off up the Waitaki Valley, the relief at the first camp that no important items had been forgotten, the feeling of success as the plains of Omarama come into view, the building apprehension as the mountains, still topped in snow seem to rise higher by the mile, the inevitable young men and boys scouting ahead on horses, one suddenly cantering back to the wagons;

  "Dad, the crick ahead is washed out, we must built a road, I think!"

  "Aye, Aye, so we must. Jamie, John, outspan the bullocks, boys, hobble the horses and bring the picks."

  Then as the late shadows creep after the sunlight across the high waving tussock, there comes a self-important girl-child.

  "Father, Mum says you must come now, tea is ready and the bannocks are hot!"

  "Aye, Lass, in just a minute. Stack the tools yon, lads, we'll soon finish in th' morn.!"

  A brief wash of tired bearded faces in the cold Ahuriri, a slow walk back to the laagered wagons, drawn together with a canvas over the wheels to block the down-valley breeze, a cheerful fire against the bank between hastily thrown up rocks over which is an iron rod with wire hooks, bubbling dixies, camp ovens and billies, with the fragrant smell of burning manuka, even a trestle table and pannikins of tea, then platefuls of mutton stew with potatoes and dumplings.

  "Will we cross the river tomorrow father? Can we really get over the mountains? Did you see the Mountain ducks? Did you see Big Billy has a sore hoof? Will we ever-”

  "Aye, Lass, never be feared. John Mhor McLean brought his wagons this way with wool only a month back and when John Mhor can go we can follow. Will ye no' be givin' us a tune, Donal?"

  Then the bullocks lumbering on up the winding valley, the curses when a wheel finds the inevitable bog, the shovelling of mud and gravel, the confusion as a second team is brought up, the cracking whips as the Bullockies lift up their voices and pray, the grunt and bellows as the bullock take up the strain, and the wheels move again.

  "Thank God for that, we're a' free!"

  A midday halt without a stick of firewood for miles.

  "How in God's name is a man expected to boil a billy?"

  "Och ye're naethin' but newchums, pit it in one o' they big tussocks and put a match to her, she'll boil soon enough!"

  Exultation as the summit of the Lindis is reached, apprehension at the steepness of the descent, grinding brakes, make camp, pick and shovel, move on, pick and shovel, build a stone retaining wall, move on till finally signs of sheep and fresh horse tracks, a rider galloping up waving his felt hat and speaking a strange tongue.

  "Do ye no' have the Gaelic? John Mhor bids ye welcome. How many are ye? Ye can pit the beasts in the paddock yon, the wagons by the burn, ye're a' expected to the bit hoose for supper this night! Twa weeks frae th' coast, ye've done weel, we havna seen a strange face this twalmond!"

  The great woolshed of Morven Hills behind, the valley narrowing until the rocky Lindis Creek bed must serve as a road, a toilsome climb out of the valley and, turning the spur of the Grandviews, the gasps as snow peak after peak comes to view.

  "Lands sakes, Father, surely we don't have to cross them?"

  "Nay, nay, the lakes lie this side of them and our land this side of the lakes. If ye climbed the brae there a bit ye could see Mount Aspiring. Gee there, ye lazy stirks!"

  Horror as a distant view shows the great blue Clutha far down in its gorge, relief when the riders report a half-made track descending to the Hawea, more relief when that threatening, swirling torrent appears crossable as a late camp is made among plentiful manuka and as wildfire flickers in the distant hills.

  "Mither, Mither! I'm frichtened, wha's a' the lights yon?"

  "Och, whisht, it’s only the Little Folk up to their tricks again, to bed with ye!"

  Black clouds drifting o'er the dark sky, the stabbing flash of fork lightening, crashing thunder booming round the hills, plunging horses, and nervous cattle, a torrent of pouring rain, water trickling through gaps in the wagon covers and through the tent canvas.

  "God save us all, if this is the dry season, may I never see it i' the wet! One of the horses has broken a hobble, we'll have a sair search in the morn!" Then with the Hawea ford behind and a bare mile to Albert's Crossing, the wagons and drays and riders halting on the bank above the river near the ford, eyes sweeping the toiling water.

  "She's high, she's high, not a banker, but I could aye wish she was lower!" Then the too-keen rider spurring his mount in, white water surging round its breast, the fatal stumble and suddenly the horse is out of its depth, floundering and spinning in the current, the head of the rider showing briefly yards away, horses galloping along the banks.

  "I can see him! No, he's gone!" At last the shivering horse, stumbling up the gravel bank, but alone. Then late at night the silent horseman walking into camp, the body stretched over the saddle.

  "Twas a' my fault! I should ne'er have let a young lad like that try the first crossing. Tomorrow I'll swim a horse over and speak with Henry Campbell, Henry and his men ken the river weel!"

  "How can ye talk so daft, ye old fule? Isn't one dead lad enough?"

  "Och, haud yer tongue woman, didn't I cross this same four times last year? I ken what I'm aboot well enough!"

  Then a rider approaching from the far bank and plunging confidently into the sweeping water.

  "Keep your wagons well up at the beginning of the ripple there. Get a man on a horse upstream with a line to the head of the lead bullock, if they turn downstream you're done! Put the women and children on the second wagon, they'll follow right enough if the first makes it."

  One can imagine also the tears of relief from the womenfolk when the last wagon is clear of the hungry river.

  "I remember saying, 'If I die here, I'll never cross that evil stream again!"' said one elderly grandmother once.

  "We turned our bullocks and cattle out on the flats beyond your house," said old Grandfather Morris. "And in the morning we could hardly find them, the toitoi and tussock were so high!"

  There must have been mixed feelings on reaching their land at last, pride mixed with alarm. "It must be good twa mile to that manuka for firewood, will we build a house safe up here but away from water, or down on those green flats and be flooded out in the spring? Too late this year to plant a crop, but we must get up a house by winter, can we wait for timber or must we use sod? Aye, a sod hut and canvas roof to store seed, flour, saddles and the like, the wagons must go for wood. A fence round an acre for potatoes, the boys can boundary ride the stock for the first year. Is that a house I see over by Cruffel? Ride over, lad and see who it might be! We can send a dray out with wool in the spring, will the flour last till then?"

  Every year, in November, Americans celebrate Thanksgiving, in memory of that first Fall, when the turkeys came out of the woods, the grain and corn had been gathered in, and it seemed they might survive their first winter. Many of our early pioneers must have felt similar emotions also in November when the first potatoes appeared and the green rows first appeared in the vegetable patch, and the stock began to fatten on the spring grass. To my knowledge, not an erudite word, not a diary survives of the first days on the wagon trail, but this was the way it must have been.

  To imagine the strings of drays and wagons going out in midsummer with the wool is not so difficult, wool was still moved from the outback stations to the nearest centres by wagon in my day.

• Chapter 4

  Bannocks o' Bere Meal, bannocks o' barley,
  Here's to the Hielanman's bannocks o' barley.
  Wha in his wae days was loyal to Charlie?
  None but the braw lads wi' bannocks o' barley!

  Arriving in the 1920's was in some ways more difficult than it had been sixty years before as, in the 1880's to 1920's the rabbit plague had swept away the rippling tussock grass and the land had the barrenness of desert. Patches of scabweed nibbled to a hard mat, alternated with bare dirt pocked by frost mounds and everywhere, especially on the banks of the terraces, yellow heaps of sand from the warrens.

  "When the dray left us here in 1924" said my Mother, "the stone cottage had a door with great gaps in it, the same door we use now in the woodshed, there were no windows and you could see the mountains through the chinks in the stone walls. The rabbitters had been living here, there were two black caverns of fireplaces, one at each end, with hooks hanging down the chimneys and the windows were just gaping holes. There was not a blade of grass and there was a rabbit warren outside the door. I collapsed on a box and cried! " But not for long.

  "Father shovelled three barrow-loads of ashes out of the fireplace before we could even light a fire, we puddled buckets of blue clay from the clay-pit up by the gate, (the present Alison Avenue) to stuff up the chinks in the wall to keep the wind from whistling through. Baby Derek was two years old and kept coming to me saying "Mummy, where can I sit?" as we had no chairs. I made him a seat on a kerosene box!"

  Kerosene for lighting came in two four-gallon tins in a wooden pine box and it was this rather than the fabled gin-case which furnished many a home. Cupboards, clothes lockers, larder or pantry, bedside tables were all made of kerosene boxes, often with a disguising curtain in front. Sometimes the tins were used as drawers with a built-in handle! Even the 12-paned windows father made were partly made of the same material and they still repel the winter gale. Where the glass came from I do not know, but by then there was a railway link from Dunedin to Cromwell with stage coach soon to give way to a solid-tyred truck linking Pembroke.

  Theoretically one could send an order to Dunedin and have it on hand in a week or so, but in practice it was much longer, in fact bulk orders for flour, sugar, tea, molasses, fence material and tools went down to Wright-Stevensons only once a year and a month or two later the boxes would be delivered marked only "T.P.G.-C.W.L.", the latter being the railway abbreviation for Cromwell. Similarly, those for Mount Aspiring would be labelled "ASP-CWL", though whether that stood for Aspiring or Aspinall no-one knew. Old Mr Walker who later managed or owned Jolly' s Store in Pembroke drove the Cobb & Co stage coach from Cromwell until the War. He once showed me his coach-whip and faded photos of the coach and five horses and told me their names, which sadly, I have long since forgotten.

  It was not long before a second-hand wood-burning stove with a "boiler" on one side with a brass tap was installed. It came from the Morris family who had replaced it with one with a separate boiler, a refinement we did not aspire to until the War. On Saturday bath nights, kerosene buckets of water from the river were put on top to heat, and a galvanised tin bath in front of the fire. Then with hot water from the buckets plus boiling water from the brass tap and a cake of pink "Lifebuoy" soap , what more could one want?

  Once, in Houston, Texas, an American woman revealed her philosophy of "What’s wrong with America!"

  "People just can't take the rate of change of way of life," said she. "Why, my Grandmother lived on a ranch in the Panhandle in a 'dobe shack, they cooked on a wood fire and got water from the crick. Now see how we live!"

  "Madame," said I, "You are describing the way I was brought up!", but the moral escaped her. There was at least plenty of meat of a sort if no grass as rabbits absolutely swarmed.

  "We walked up to the top of the terrace" said Mother, "and I clapped my hands and it seemed as the land itself moved as thousands of rabbits ran for their holes in the terrace above." Where the money was found for miles of rabbit-proof netting fence I cannot imagine as the costs of fencing them out is prohibitive even now, but posts mainly came from the hundreds of poplars planted round the old homestead and by the river by Wilkins and Henry Campbell. Straight poplar splits easily and lasts well out of the ground but as a post had a life of three or four years. The poplars, now 130 years old still stand to the great delight of painters and photographers when they "turn" in the Fall.

  Once about 300 acres had been enclosed in fencing and rabbits almost eliminated by poisoning and traps, sheep and a cow or two could be run. The first sheep were bought from the Riley’s of Timaru Creek Station and put out on the hill (Mount Iron). When they were mustered in, they had no wool whatever on their legs or bellies at all!

  "They must have a disease!" said Mother anxiously, and the Stock Inspector was consulted, who roared!

  "Yes, Mrs Gunn, it's a disease called "Fern!"" he said at last.

  "I felt such a fool," said Mother. For the first year food consisted mainly of rabbits and potatoes and bread, though to begin with Father, after his years in West Australia would make damper. A kitchen garden was planted in. damp patch of good soil on a bank above the swamp, immediately below Campbell's old homestead and half a mile from the river. Alas, in the spring the river rose ten feet and backed up round the hollow and the garden was flooded and destroyed. A second year was faced with wrinkled potatoes, rabbit and the odd swede.

  "Did you really lose your whole garden?" enquired a local Lady of the Manor.

  "I am afraid so," Mother admitted.

  "How terrible. I'm sure we could let you have a cabbage !" and Mother remembering the children and the wrinkled potatoes, swallowed her pride and said "That would be very acceptable!" but no cabbage came.

  Perhaps the story spread, but sometime later an unknown person left a whole sack of juicy green cabbages at our gate. We never found out who, but more than seventy years later we have not forgotten! People were diffident about offering help which could be strongly resented by the independent recipients. "Don't want their damned charity!" was a phrase often heard, so that people offered gifts in an often less than gracious way.

  Once a neighbour telephoned to say a parcel had been left at our gate, which turned out to be five pounds of beef sausages, bought sausages usually not being seen from years' beginning to years' end. Mother telephoned to express thanks and came away from the hand-cranked machine laughing somewhat ruefully.

  She said, “Don’t thank me, I won them in a raffle, and Blanche said she doesn't like them, and Jock said they would make him sick and I didn't like to give them to the dogs so I thought you could have them! Well, it was nice of her all the same!"

  Within a few years the rabbit warren by the door had been converted, with the aid of soil and every available cow-pat and horse-dropping into a quarter-acre of neat rows of cabbage, peas, runner beans, butter beans, broad beans, raspberries, red, black and white currants, grapes, radishes, lettuce, carrots, parsnips, onions, spring onions, leeks, kale, apples, plums, cherries, nectarines, damsons, apricots and peaches. We also usually planted another quarter or half acre of potatoes mainly for sale. The stores in Wanaka bought them for about 2 1 /2d a pound and sold them for about 4d! On the other side of the garden was a dazzling display of flowers, like most Victorian women, Mother could not accept a life without colour and flowers. An 8ft fence of tightly packed manuka gave some protection against the drying nor-westers but in summer there were times when the garden could only be saved by dozens of tiring trips to the river with buckets. Every house in Strath Clutha had its vegetable garden, but not many flower displays could match ours! In many ways, country life then was much as it had always been for at least three thousand years. Very little food was eaten that was not grown locally. We bought salt in five-pound bags, and pepper and mustard, while sugar came in 281b sacks. Flour came from Reid's mill at Luggate, being ground from the hard wheat of Hawea Flat. A water race built by miners brought water to the mill for several miles from Luggate creek high on Griffel, and the giant overshot wheel turned majestically, as perhaps it still does. No one gave the grinding mill wheels a passing glance, flour had been ground that way from time immemorial. Water-driven flour mills in Nepal have mill wheels hand-hammered out of schist and it is the upper stone which is fixed, while the lower wheel (which has a square hole cut in the centre) is turned by a water-powered wooden shaft. I suspect Reids mill had steel shafting but a water wheel seemed to be so inescapably the logical way to grind flour. Now they probably zap it with laser beams! Some farms took their own wheat to the mill, Hec Halliday says his family would periodically take a dray-load, as they needed about a 2OO1b bag of flour a month, as up to 14 men might be on the property at once during the harvest.

  Every farm grew the odd acre of oats to feed the horses and sometimes cows, but for some curious reason, oatmeal was usually bought from the mills in Gore. Oats were cut by binder and stacked in beautifully conical stacks until chaff-cutting time and though Clan Gunn must have ground its own oatmeal for a thousand years or so I have never heard of home-made oatmeal here.

  Mother was a great bread-maker. One day just before St Patrick's day she called me in.

  "Which of these loaves will I put in the Show?" she demanded. To me they looked identical with delicately browned crust, rolled and kneaded on the white-pine table, risen in pans behind the stove, and baked for two hours in the oven, fired by the best dry manuka.

  "Put them both in," said I carelessly. A few days later, at The Show, I walked along the displays to see the two white loaves with a Red and a Green for a First and a Second, and another Red for the Brown Bread entry. Reids put up a prize of 150Ibs of flour for First, 100lbs for Second and 100lbs of Wholemeal for the brown-bread First. Free bread for a year! There was in fact a bakery in Pembroke which produced only white bread with a papery interior and a leather crust. Arthur Wilson used to eat the centres and throw the crust to the birds, Father refused to eat either! Like all our neighbours, we separated our own cream, made butter in a wooden churn, sometimes cheese as well. Meat came from the weekly-killed sheep of which we usually sold half as meat only kept a few days in the water-chilled safe. In exchange we sometimes got a side of beef, but it was usually roast mutton on Sunday, cold on Monday, brisket on Tuesday, chops on Wednesday, stew on Thursday and Shepherd's Pie on Friday and perhaps fried liver on Saturday.

  The sugar-bags made universal carryalls, with a potato in one corner and a sling of flax string. Shearers carried their shears and gear in them, musterers their lunch and oilskins, fencers their wirestrainer, carpenters their hammer, chisel and level, shooters their glasses and spare ammo, how does the world survive without the sugar bag? The lighter flour sacks made aprons, hand-towels and not uncommonly, work-frocks for the women, or even a summer shirt for children.

  Most iron work, gate hinges and cruder tools were made at Templeton’s blacksmith shop, the "Smiddy" as it universally called. All woollen jumpers, jerseys and gloves were hand-knitted and I have a vivid memory of old Mrs Pinckney of Waikaia Downs on the veranda at her spinning wheel, carding raw wool. It was her boast that every man on that vast sprawling run had one of her raw-wool jerseys, and when the winter snow comes sweeping over The Old Man and lies two feet deep round Titan Rocks Hut the grateful shepherds would mutter "Aye, she's a grand old Lady!"

  However little we had been affected by the Industrial Revolution, Richard Arkwright and his spinning Jenny had had one bad effect, cottage industry had died. However, while we could have made our own plaids, up in Central in the summer heat while stooking the wheat, one needs cotton clothes which were hard to come by. Personally I have never lived as well as regards food as I did in the days of the "Great Depression" but clothes were patched and patched again, and shoes were a luxury to be worn in the cold months of April till September.

  For the rest of the year we went in barefeet and in fact yearned all winter for that blissful day when Mother would say, "Yes, I think it’s warm enough." The feel of fresh grass between the toes, the light-footed feeling on being able to jump to the moon, the mad dash over the grass and uphill and down dale, the tender feeling of uncalloused soles, and the residual feeling of chill seeping up from a still cold ground.

  "Is your family very poor, then, poor boy?" enquired a very primly dressed little English Miss. My gaze wandered over the fenced and unfenced fields, the distant stone cottage, the grazing horses and sheep.

  "I don't think so," said I finally. "Why do you ask?"

  "But you must be" she persisted. "You have no shoes!"

  "I like it that way," I said, mystified. "Take yours off and try!" and was even more baffled by her look of horror. Later, while at Waiho, I met another very proper Miss, Finishing School in the south of France and all that. I tried to lead her over the airfield so that she could see the Franz Josef Glacier in the light of the fading sun, but the wet ground was too soft for her high heels and I made the same suggestion, "Take them off!"

  "My dear young man!" she exclaimed, in much the same tone of voice she might have used had I said "Throw off everything and we will dance naked round a fire!" Strange people, them foreigners! Again, oddly enough, shoes were bought, yet there was enough untanned leather about. Most people had a suit for "best" and fairly ragged work clothes for all the production of Mosgiel, Kaiapoi, Ross & Glendinning, Sargood Son & Ewen Mills was in wool. If Robbie Burns could say :

  “My sarks they are few, but five of them new,
  Twal hundred, as white as the snaw man,
  A ten shillin' hat, a Holland cravat, .. “

  there must indeed have been "nae mony poets sae braw, man" at least amongst his relatives in far off Zealand. Producing all your own food can have one serious disadvantage, if your local soil has trace element deficiencies you will have health problems and the quartz schists of Otago had little calcium, fluorine, sulfur, selenium, iodine and not much iron and soon, with her training at St Mary's Hospital in London behind her, the local health problems began to worry Mother. As the nearest hospital was 35 miles away, near Cromwell, for most people it might as well have been in Australia. When Pembroke finally obtained a doctor, there was little he could do except prod a fevered body and say

  "Um, yes, Mrs - , probably scarlet fever (or chicken pox, or TB, or pneumonia or polio), there's a lot of it about. Keep him in bed a few days. That will be three guineas!"

  When the party-line telephone appeared, Mother seemed to spend hours a day giving medical advice and reassuring frantic mothers. I remember some of them

  "Oh dear, Mrs -, is Jack down with it too? Yes it must be pleurisy. They were droving in the rain you say? Can you manage up there? Will I send Bernard up for a few days on the horse? What is his temperature? Oh Dear! Yes, take it every four hours and if it gets any higher you must call the Quack!" (which unflattering term was invariably applied to the local medico.)

  About 1930, young Arthur Scaife went down with rheumatic fever. His temperature rising, he recalls Dave Trevathan helping him saddle his horse, but nothing of the ride home to Glendhu where his parents found him lying face down in the yard have fallen after attempting to dismount. With no antibiotics he was lucky to survive, and most families had a gap or two in their ranks. It was common for children to lose most of their teeth by the age of fifteen and Mother became convinced that calcium deficiency was the reason so she doled out calcium tablets with some success. Dental science did not catch up with the essential role of fluorine until much later. Goitre was also a recurrent problem and Mother had many earnest conversations with a Dunedin doctor who came every Christmas to fish. I later knew him as Sir Charles Hercus, Dean of the Medical School.

  "Yes, yes, you are quite right Mrs Gunn," he would murmur, prodding throats. "Definitely a touch of goitre, definitely. Iodine is contraindicated wouldn't you say? Oh, definitely!"

  Women suffered from anaemia especially after childbirth and "Iron" became a catchword. Among the men, for all their gaunt build and hard work, their health was not good partly because of poor diet. Porridge and eggs and bacon for breakfast was fine, but often it was only porridge and toast followed by cold mutton and mashed potatoes for lunch. To save time the women would peel and boil the potatoes before 11 am, mash them and put them at the back of the stove where any possible remaining vitamin was oxidised and any cabbage was inevitably boiled to rags. However, there was a good deal of opposition to eating potatoes cooked in their jackets and to fresh vegetables of any kind.

  "God save ye, Missus!" rumbled a shearer looking at his plate with fresh new potatoes, lettuce, tomato, cucumber and spring onion. "But that stuff is plain rabbit feed!"

  But after her earnest lecture, they would humour her by eating it.

  "You wouldn't have some of that plum wine to go with it, would ye, Missus?" said old Arthur Wilson, twinkling.

  "Oh, heavens," Mother would cry. "Will you never let me forget it? How was I to know it was so alcoholic? The men kept saying "This is good stuff, Missus, can I have another glass?", and I watched them positively roll back to the yards and I thought "Heavens, you would think they were tipsy!"

  "I tell you, that wine was the talk of the sheds," chuckled Arthur. "You should hear the way Ivan Carson tells it, Missus. He swears that for two hours he couldn't tell if he was shearing his sheep or Bill's! Taking advantage of simple shearers, that's what it is, first its plum wine and now its cucumber and grass!" and he ate on, nobly.

  "Your mother means well," he said to me later, sitting on a wool bale at smoko. "But meat and spuds is good enough for me!" and as Arthur at the age of 65 or more, with his lean spare build could easily have passed for a fit 45, it was hard to argue. Winter brings the snow down to the flats, ice covers the ponds and frost sets the ground like concrete and brings an end to all things green so that "Meat and spuds" and a few onions, carrots stored in a pit and perhaps swedes formed the diet until the "Rhubarb Season", rhubarb being the first fresh plant coming in about October. Mother began preserving, and as years went by the pantry grew and shelves groaned under rows of jars of bottled gooseberries, jams, marmalade, plums, nectarines, raspberries, cherries, beans, and so on so that the diet of winter differed little from summer.

  Mother had one social occasion she especially looked forward to, the monthly meeting of the Women's Division of the Farmers Union, usually held at Hawea Flat. To begin with Father drove her in horse and trap, but later as more neighbours acquired cars, kindly people would stop by to pick her up, the Studholme’s in the Model T, or Mrs Kane of Hawea would send young Dave Kane to fetch her, a long drive of six miles each way on the rough gravel roads.

  Mother preached diet and preserving and earnest young girls came to learn the technique. "Do I top up the jars before sealing them, Mrs Gunn?" One day she came home, ecstatic.

  "We have this visiting American woman from a place called Dakota, it sounds just like here, miles from anywhere and they have hills called "The Rockies" not far away. She has the strangest accent but she does just like I do, except she calls it "Bartling"! And they cut ice in the ponds in winter and it keeps food cold all through the summer in their "Ice House". Fancy that!"

• Chapter 5

  Bullocks are marvellous draught animals especially in soft muddy conditions but after the turn of the century they were seen no more, except at the Makarora sawmill, there being enough roads that horses could be used which are faster and stony soil is the norm in Strath Clutha, stones being hard on bullocks' hooves. The roads tended to be dusty and stony in summer and frozen to white iron on winters' mornings but a sea of mud when the frost thawed.

  Horse-drawn and later tractor-drawn graders smoothed the roads out in summer but in winter coaches or cars were often forced to abandon a particularly muddy stretch so that sometimes, there were three or four parallel tracks and one chose the least muddy or took to the tussock. Wagons and drays were still used to bring the wool, grain, hay, chaff, or hides in from the outlying farms and stations to the railhead and the parsimonious Government was cursed for refusing to extend the line up-valley to Hawea or Pembroke. By 1920 solid-tyred trucks were beginning to be used between Pembroke and Cromwell, and cars commonly crossed the Lindis after The War, true, with many breakdowns, and with passengers walking the steeper bits.

  Even by 1954, some roads were still mere tracks. I left Mt Cook Hermitage on my motor cycle looking up the Tasman at an approaching snowstorm. After twenty miles of snow-covered gravel I reached Pukaki and went into the Pub to warm up in front of the open fire.

  "Did you hear the news?" asked the Publican. "Ed Hillary has just climbed Everest!"

  From there to Omarama was as rough a piece of travel as I have ever seen. Under the six inches of snow was mud and I slewed about, often puttering along over the tussock several chain from the actual road, or, rather, series of tracks. The upgrading of roads had not reached the Mackenzie Country. Finaly, my trusty Triumph and I reached Omarama and ate the usual greasy pie and it seemed that as the snow was still falling heavily, that this might be the end of the journey for some days. But no! The Mount Cook bus appeared and the driver swore he would make Queenstown that night if a grader would grade away the snow up to the top of the Lindis.

  I followed behind the bus, slewing about on the icy surface. At the top of the Pass the grader driver stopped, "This is the end of my County!" he said.

  "Come on, Man!" said I, "You can grade a few miles further, it's two feet deep here!"

  "Doesn't matter!" said the independent Mt Cook driver, "I can make it downhill!" and he churned off, though in places it was impossible to my eye to see where the road might be. I now had the width of the dual tyres to ride in and often slewed off to one side, the snow blocking the air intake so the motor would die until the snow was scraped out with a bare finger. Then the clutch began to give out with the hard usage, and just when I was considering abandoning the machine and going on foot, a light appeared in some trees at Breast Hills Station, (now gone). I parked the machine and walked up a probable road under two and a half feet of snow and knocked at a door. A woman opened and looked at me in amazement.

  "Every picture tells a story!" said I. "The snow-bound traveller, dying on his feet, makes a refuge!"

  "Heaven above! It's Bernard Gunn!" said Mrs Falkner. "I'm an old friend of your Mother's, come in do!" The next day I walked out to Morven Hills, and came back a week later to rescue the machine. Now the Lindis is a wide sealed road and it is unthinkable that travellers should be lost in the snow.

  By 1939 most of the station roads had improved to the point that wagons were no longer used though a few like Mount Aspiring or Mt. Albert still relied on wagon and dray because of rivers. Old wagons and drays may still be seen mouldering in Station yards.

  Carrots were used as bait for rabbit poisoning and we often planted an acre or two. Weeding by hand on knees in the hot sun is a fashious business and digging them from frozen ground in June is impossible. We used to loosen them in the ground with forks in the late afternoon when the frost had thawed but next day topping with a heavy sheath knife and bagging frozen carrots was hard on juvenile fingers. As Galbraith, the Scots-Canadian economist said of his upbringing on an Ontario farm, after life on a farm, nothing I have ever done has seemed like work again!

  Once in about 1935, six tons were ordered by a run down Tarras way and eventually a mighty wagon with six great jingling Clydesdale horses came to take them away. Three or four men and a boy alighted and greeted Father with outstretched hands.

  "How are ye keepin' then, Tom?"

  "Fine, thank ye Jack, fine. And how are things Down Valley?" and inevitably the conversation turned to that ancient enemy, the weather.

  "How did ye get on in that Southerly Buster back in September?"

  "Aye, that was a disaster, we lost nigh on two hundred lambs, set us back it has."

  "God save us, and I thought it hard we lost a dozen!" and then finally, "Well, we had best get loaded!" and by pure muscle power the sacks weighing 120 - 150 lbs each were stacked aboard.

  "Will ye call at the house for a cup o' tea?"

  "No, thank ye kindly, but we must make the Flat by tonight." The sprung driver's seat seemed to reach the sky but when you are at an age when your head barely reached the hub of a wheel all things look high. The driver untied the ribbons and shook them out, plaiting them between fingers.

  "Now, boys!" and the Clydesdales began to shuffle into their traces. "Come on now, Gee! Get up! Gee there I say!" and the great beasts shuffled their huge, hairy, iron-shod feet back and dug in their toes, mighty muscles rippled and they heaved forward.

  "Gee, now!" and the wagon wheels began to roll, the chain tugs and traces bar taut, hames and collars packed solid against the great neck and shoulder muscles, all six pulling in trained unison. The ruts of the iron tyres were still to be seen ten years later. A sack of chaff and nose bags were carried aboard and they would be home down past Lagoon Valley by the next day. Though I often drove three horses in a dray, I have never had a six-in-hand and probably now never will, though Alexander the Great moved his supplies in four and six-horse wagons and that was not yesterday!

  One could only get to Mount Aspiring Station by horse or dray which made a visit to our friends, the Aspinall’s, the adventure of a life time. I already hated car travel, I could get car-sick in three miles, I loathed the smell of petrol and dust and the stuffiness and at the age of six happiness was leaning against a saddled horse with the tang of leather and the comforting smell of horse, or sitting in a saddle as the horse delicately picked its way along the trail, plunged through a pool and cantered sedately over the river flats.

  To get to Mount Aspiring, thirty miles away and up in the mountains on the far side of Lake Wanaka took a long day. Usually we would get as far as Cattle Flat by horse and trap, or after about 1932, by Perrow's Store cart, a 15cwt Ford which made the rounds of west Wanaka every Wednesday delivering bread and groceries. It meant stopping at every farm beyond Wanaka Station dropping off brown-paper parcels at roadside boxes or into the hands of work-worn women, soon passing round Glendhu Bay, with, if we were lucky, a distant glimpse of Aspiring, mirrored in the lake. At Glendhu Station Mr Willis Scaife would raise his hat to Mother and greet us warmly, Mrs Scaife would be more insistent,

  "You must come in for a cup of tea, it's not often we can welcome you to Glendhu!" Poor Mr Perrow could wait! Winding round the Glendhu Bluff where low stone walls gave some protection from a vertical fall into the lake, then a diversion to West Wanaka Station and Ewings, then back to Hospital Flat, a curious wild swampy plain a mile or so across and tufted with toetoe surrounded by the black bluffs of glaciated hills, where, 'twas believed, a Maori battle had once taken place when the Kai Tahu were exterminating the Ngatimamoe or perhaps when the Ngatimamoe were exterminating the Waitaha people. On over the ford in the Matatap River to enter the beginning of the broad Matukituk Valley and Cattle Flat Station. The Twin Falls cascade down the mountainside to the left and there were glimpses of the snow and icefields above. Over the emerald green of the unfenced river flats one could see the distant river and beyond it more purple mountains. Ahead, twenty miles away, the blue ice of Treble Cone (Mt Avalanche) but Aspiring would be hidden behind Niger Peak, and somewhere at its foot lay Mount Aspiring Station.

  A cluster of buildings ringed by pine trees marked Cattle Flat Station, with stockmen cantering about on magnificent horses and cattle bawling in the yards and Mr Aubrey, dressed in tweed britches and tan riding boots would invite us to the house for tea. John Aspinall of Mt. Aspiring had been a stockman on Cattle Flat before The War but in 1919 returned to take up the run at the head of the Valley which had been vacant for some time and which Cattle Flat had for some time had the free use of. There was a certain amount of resentment at this loss of grazing land and a friend of the Aspinall’s was not necessarily welcome at Cattle Flat.

  Soon, Stewart Chisholm, a stockman from Mount Aspiring appeared hat in hand, on the weekly thirty-mile round trip to Cattle Flat to pick up mail and stores. "Are ye ready to go, Missus Gunn?" Soon all our belongings would be stowed in the dray in which there was straw to sit on and even a sprung seat. The three Clydesdales, named inevitably Punch, Judy and Bloss, stepped out with massive assurance, harness jingling, and at times they even trotted. Why it took such massive traction power to pull a largely empty dray was not obvious but it certainly gave a great deal more assurance in the river crossings that the light spring-cart ever could. Once beyond the gate by the Cattle Flat yards, there was not another fence between us and the Tasman Sea! A series of waterfalls cascaded down the mountainside on our left and would cross the flat as small creeks, which, in heavy rain could grow to the point that they could themselves be impassable. We crossed Speargrass Creek with the mica in the sand gleaming, on past herds of grazing Herefords and flocks of ducks. At Phoebes, Chisholm, a tall good-looking serious young man, with a hand so large he could pick up a dinner plate, descended to take a cautious look at the banks and then we surged through over the pink piedmontite schist stones that have made Phoebes famous.

  "That was how old Mr McPherson, who used to live up the West Branch, drowned," said Stewart. "The bank gave way and the dray rolled on him."

  "I have always felt so sorry for the McPhersons," said Mother. "He was deaf you know, from the noise of the waterfalls, and one day when he was working by the river, the youngest child was swept away and he didn't even hear it cry out!" It seemed to me that adults always had the most gloomy conversations.

  As the valley narrows, the dark green birch forest appears on the far side of the valley, flecked with the lighter green of the Red Birch, the mountains grow higher and the country wilder. On past deep-cut Boil-The-Billy and Niger Point and stopping briefly at Niger Hut where there were some musterers in residence, and Aspiring Homestead could be just made out three miles across the river. Further travel up the river was blocked by Niger Bluff and here we would turn and, following the tracks made early in the morning, make for the ford over the great Matukituk itself. The first few branches of silty and fast-flowing water were harmless enough but then came the main stream, deep and turbulent. This time the water did not even enter the dray but I have at other times crossed clinging to the rail at the front of the dray with water to my childish knees.

  "Get up there, Bloss, come on Punch, what's the matter, never seen the river before? Gee, Punch!" and the steel hooves rang on stone and the wheels ground while the grey water surged rounds the horses chests and spray flew. Soon we were through and clear of the river on grass banks again.

  Night was falling and above the dark birch forest came almost down to the flat and we came to a halt.

  "Could you hold the horses a bit, Missus Gunn? I have to drop some bread off for a deer-culler here in Mill Creek Hut!" Chisholm vanished into the dark towards a weird wailing noise and poor Mother stood nervously holding the heads of the great horses, so much higher that her own. In a few minutes Chisholm was back.

  "He was sitting in the dark by the fire and playing the pipes!" A mile or so further on we were above Niger Bluff and the river had to be crossed again onto Cameron's Flat which was level and green and later fenced as [the] Aspinall’s used it to grow hay. Another mile and the West Branch had to be crossed as the house lies in a Y between the two rivers, the East Branch being too deep and treacherous to cross by dray. By now it was pitmirk and the road wound about over the flat for a couple of miles with only the jagged outlines of the mountains hanging above our very heads and the air damp with a smell that means "Bush". Finally at nearly ten o'clock at night we rounded the woolshed where we were met by the Aspinall family, Mrs A wildly excited, swinging a hurricane lantern and crying "Welcome to Mount Aspiring!"

  We climbed stiffly down and I shyly shook hands with Pat, a grave, fairhaired girl of my own age.

  "I'm so glad you've come," she said. "We haven't seen a soul for three months!" The house (now a Youth Hostel) was built of red birch lumber milled at Mill Creek and stands on a knoll above the floods. Soon we were in the kitchen under the yellow light of a kerosene lamp with a great fire in the living room and a hot meal. People laughed readily at Mount Aspiring, perhaps because tragedy lay never very far below the surface.

  Jack Aspinall was, like Father, a cavalryman but he had been in France and had brought his mount home, a quiet black mare called Mary of impeccable virtue on whom I had learned to ride. Dear old Mary, if I fell off it was never her fault, and she would slide to a halt and wait patiently to be remounted and I remember Mrs A showing me how to plait the reins through one's fingers. At Mount Aspiring, be sure your bed would be Short-sheeted or Apple-pied. The usual pit toilet had an overhead box and a chain like the more modern contrivances in town. City guests would pull the chain, to a crash of pealing bells and would come out red-faced, to face the grinning family.

  "Caught another one!" they would cry.

  I would be up at dawn to steal to the back door and stare at the waterfalls cascading down, at the green birchwood, listen to the bell birds and perhaps even see a deer over the creek which lay below the house.

  Mount Aspiring meant riding as there were a dozen horse in their remuda whereas we had one or two, and the land was mainly unfenced so one could gallop almost anywhere. As well as stately black Mary, there was big-boned bay Peggy and the lighter Patty, the rough-gaited sorrel Scotty who was part draught and often used in the spring cart and a reliable horse in the river, the skittish Ginger and then there was Pearl of rolling eye and uncertain temper who might kick or buck or jib at jumps.

  "Mr E. (Roland Ellis of Dunedin) was up here with his family at Christmas," chuckled Mr A. "We had to round up some cattle on the flat and young Murray was dead keen to come so we put him on Pearl. “You just canter round the back of them and jump that bit of bog and start them this way.” Well, off he went, Pearl jibbed at the jump and in Master Murray went, ha, ha, ha!"

  Mr A had an inimitable Liverpool accent and spoke out of the corner of his mouth, had twinkling grey eyes and would often talk to me and it was not common for adults to waste time talking to children in those days. Pat and her older brother Jerry were virtually born on horses and Pat could never understand my caution when dodging at a gallop through trees and round rocks or when she spurred her horse into deep pools to swim over. We had enough sense to keep out of the main rivers, but backwaters were fair game!

  Once, going for a swim, we thundered over the flat on the one horse and bareback, the other horses being used by the men out on the range. Peggy jinked round a boulder and we fell off rolling harmlessly over on the sand.

  "You pulled me off!" said Pat indignantly. Until I was about ten or twelve, Mary was my favourite horse. True, she had trouble in keeping up with Pat on Peggy at full gallop but she would stand quietly alongside a rock or stockyard rail so that I could mount. On my last ride on faithful Mary, she was, I believe, 34 years old.

  Mr A ' s sense of humour was at times a bit broad. We were crossing the river from Camerons and Scotty with Mother up balked at the current. Mr A impatiently gave him a flick with the stockwhip and Scotty reared and plunged through and bolted not stopping till he reached the stockyard gate.

  "I was absolutely terrified!" Mother confessed, "and I held onto leather with both hands. When I got off I could still hear Mr A laughing a mile across the flat, he nearly fell off his horse.

  “I could see the top of Mount Aspiring between you and the saddle, woman!” was all he could say when he came up. “Really! Old Jack goes a bit far at times!"

  Dawn at Mount Aspiring was always a delight but best savoured alone. Slipping out of the house, perhaps on foot or perhaps taking a horse, or, when I was older, a long-barrelled rifle, through the side gate, across the house waterfall skirting the birch wood, with the bellbirds and tuis singing their hearts out in the dawn chorus, a shuddering wade through the liquid ice of Snowy Creek, glancing up at the snow on the Popes Nose at the head of the Snowy with perhaps a rumble of the first avalanche as the first rays of sun struck the tops, and then on through the woods where the East Branch swings across from the north side of the valley. Beyond lie a series of grassy glades between the rattling river and the strip of wood below the mountains. There, there would almost certainly be a few hinds and a spiky or two skittering about, periodically throwing up their heads to sniff the air. I soon learnt not to stare for more than a few seconds at a time, deer know when they are being watched, indeed it is a pretty insensitive human who does not get a prickling between the shoulders in the same situation. Soon would come a great stag, mincing along wearing his antlers like a crown, pausing to graze and then moving closer. I have lain behind a windfall for half an hour with the sandflies making a grand meal of the backs of my knees, squinting through the Parker-Hale sight, waiting for that stag to come closer. Then the gun bellowed and echoes crashed and carrawonged round the mountains, the hinds dashing madly for the timber while the great stag fell to lie still.

  Once, at this same point, a stag, only wounded, ran into the river but lacked the strength to cross and stood in the current. If I shot him again I would lose him in the river, so dropping the gun I waded out to have it out hand to hand. I got a hold of his antlers from behind the shoulder as a big stag can kill you if you are stupid enough to get in front, but then I could not draw a knife so finally I drowned him there in the cold dark water. Once I shot a spiky in the woods there and brought Scotty to take him home for dog tucker. Scotty smelt the blood from five chain off and gave me a devil of a time.

  Back at the house breakfast would be on and the standard of the porridge and cream at Mount Aspiring was always high, followed by the usual fried eggs, bacon and toast. Then there would be cows to milk, separating to be done and the day planned, always prefaced by - "we must saddle-up and ---, which is how God meant men to live, seeing the world from the back of a horse. We have been riding horses for two and a half thousand years, and using them in chariots with spoked wheels for two thousand years before that, but it is still amazing that it took five hundred years to invent the stirrup and over three thousand years to invent the horse collar, whereas the complex and technically difficult wheel has been with us for about five thousand years.

  Harking back to the porridge the old practice of eating your oats with "a pinch o' saut, " was never common.

  "Losh, Mon!" said Jock Woods of Spring Creek once in some horror as I poured on the brown sugar and cream, "It isna a puddin'!" When we were young, Pat and I would take sandwiches and explore on our own, the horses picking their way carefully along cattle trails through trees or by the tumbling streams. Cascade was another name to conjure with, ten miles up the West Branch where the corrugated-iron Cascade Huts marked the end of the open grazing country, past the Wishbone Falls, past Rob Roy, at the end of the world. Beyond through the bush lay Shovel Flat and Pearl Flat, Gloomy Gorge, the Arawhata Saddle, Hectors Col, Mount French with, beyond it, through The Quarterdeck, the snow blowing from Aspiring summit in a waving banner just as it blows from Everest in the monsoon gales.

  We only went to Cascade for the lamb marking, or the fall muster or to bring in cattle and it had the romance that once Khatmandu or Lhasa had. Now the valley is littered with lodges and fourwheel drive vehicles roar about, helicopters rend the air, jet-boats scream up the river, hordes of tourists scatter trash and wear out the scenery with cameras, but the snow banner still blows from Aspiring. It is a strange world we have made.

  In the evening round the log fire, the grown-ups told stories, the kind of stories that children can only listen to with eyes like mill-wheels.

  "Last week," Mr A would begin, "There was this big stag across the creek and Stewart cam' ut wi' the rifle and fired and it dropped in its tracks. We were shor' a' dog tucker, ye know, an' he took a horse over and started hookin' chains rounds its legs. All of a sudden, it up on its feet and took to him, an' here is Stewart runnin' like hell wi' this great stag no' a yard behind. Lucky, Garth still has the rifle and fired and got it, but Stewart swears he missed him by a foot!" All of this was related with actions of terror and fright and roars of laughter.

  When the time came to leave, inevitably the rain poured down and the river ran a banker, whole trees tossing on the waves of a grey ferocious tide. After three days I rode over to the river with Mr A who muttered "Stay 'ere,lad ! " and urged his horse in. Suddenly, his horse (Scotty, I think) was swept away with appalling speed but Mr A sat in the saddle like a burr, crouching low, his old peaked felt hat in place. Just as suddenly, Scotty found his feet and heaved out, up the distant bank. Mr A rode upstream a quarter mile and slanted back across on a shallower bar.

  "Not today, I think, ha, ha, ha!" he cackled.

  "If you have to get off your horse, lad," he said as we trotted home, "Get off upstream, the horse sort of swims on his side with legs downstream and you can get kicked. And always hang on to a stirrup!" Good advice, Davy Gunn knew rivers but he was finally washed off his horse and drowned in the Hollyford.

  I admired Mr A immensely, from a distance. Father was a cavalryman too, and had "a good seat on a horse", but Mr A could rope a Poly bull! I was sitting on a massive totara post in the stockyard as the bull rooted and snorted in the yard and refused to go wherever it was he was wanted to go. Mr A, sitting astride the top rail, swung a lasso and dropped it over his neck, snubbing the bitter end to a post and the bull crashed to the ground. The wet line was buried deep in his neck and the bull wheezed and gasped and rolled up its eyes. Mr A , sitting on the bull's head was unable to free the line.

  "Gie's yer knife, Stewart," said Mr A urgently. "He's gonna choke!" Finally the line was cut and the ungrateful bull scrambled to his feet and charged Mr A, who leapt seven feet to the top rail in one bound, then Stewart Chisholm and Jerry in rapid succession and then charged the post I was sitting on with a mighty crash, luckily a foot or two low.

  "I think he's gonna live, ha! ha!" laughed Mr A.

  One day, Mr A together with Stewart Chisholm, Jerry and my older brother Derek departed for Cascade to bring in yearling steers. For three days it rained solidly and we watched Hells Gates at the entrance to the West Branch anxiously. Finally the herd could be seen milling about on the far bank of the river and we could count four horses and Mrs A sighed in relief.

  "They' re all there, thank God!" The cattle poured into the swirling stream urged on by lashing whips and half a dozen cattle dogs. They came near the yards and encountered the first fence they had seen in their short lives and one beast broke away pursued madly by the dogs. It hit the wire, there was a "Crash - twang!" and wires parted and the beast staggered to its feet and tore on no doubt wondering what it had hit.

  Finally they were all yarded and the men rode slowly and stiffly up to the back door, and sat in their sodden oilskins, too stiff and weary to dismount while the rain still fell. We pulled them down and they were led away to hot baths while Pat and I led the shivering horses back to the barn to be unsaddled and rubbed down. Mr A had a new yellow stock saddle with knee pads, much more impressive than the worn old "military" saddles we usually used. We poured out chaff and made our way back to the house. Mr A was already bathed and sat in front of a roaring fire in his dressing gown, holding a cup of tea, his face uncommonly clean.

  "Did ye gie them plenty o' chaff, Boy?" he asked.

  "Oh, yes," said I, "and we fed the dogs."

  "Tha's good," he said absently, staring into the fire. "It’s a hard life on the horses and dogs." He did not seem to consider that perhaps it was also a hard life on men. Later in life I used to wonder what the life expectancy of men in a similar situation would be if they always returned, not to hot fires and baths, but to a cold wet hut. Perhaps this aspect of back-country life has not changed that much. Young John Aspinall remembers coming in from the range in the rain, not so many years back, stiff cold and wet, and, dismounting with difficulty, falling on his face in the mud, being unable to stand.

  Like all back-country Station men Mr A could be hard on animals on occasion. Once the men were working at the stockyard and some guests were expected up from Dunedin. (I think it was Les Woods and family). Mrs A came out by the front door and peered through the glass.

  “Jack, Jack!"she shouted. "The flag, the flag!” and three miles away through the clouds of silt dust blowing down the valley and over by Niger Hut, the flag could be seen fluttering on its pole, meaning a lift over the river was needed. Mr A ran up a reply flag and went to round up the horses in the orchard, who for some reason ran and dodged as horses do when they are wanted urgently and refused to be caught. I was grooming Mary by the back door when Mr A appeared, somewhat out of sorts.

  "Gie's yer horse, boy!" and he swung up and thundered off. He was not spurred but carried a dog collar which he applied to poor Mary with a will. Hell for leather, he flashed in and out among the trees and soon the horses were streaming into the yards. Mr A cantered back and flung me the reins without a word and soon was trotting out of the yards leading a string of saddled mounts. Poor Mary stood with heaving sides and in trepidation I sponged down her bleeding flanks.

  Actually, this was a point on which I thought Mrs A was quite repressive, she did not like horses at the kitchen door with the resultant horse manure being tramped into the house and she used to periodically insist that horses be brought no nearer than the House paddock a dozen yards away. I thought this most unfair, I liked having my horse look in the door when having pikelets and cocoa for morning tea, and in fact would not have thought it out of place to have a horse at the table, or a dog for that matter. The dogs evidently thought so to for interruptions at the table of "Get outside, Mutt!" were frequent.

  Working cattle varies in method in different countries, here the cattle dogs and the stockwhips play an important role. In Texas and Wyoming where I was later occasionally out on the range, all the work is done by the horse, heading, shouldering and driving. Putting a mere fifty cattle over Sunlight Creek near Cody, Wyoming, without dogs to bunch them together and without the stockwhip to push forward the balky ones, the horses were soon a lather of sweat. Your Western cowboy then simply throws his saddle onto a fresh horse. Cattle herding spread north from Mexico where of course, the cactus means that dogs cannot be used.

  The Mexican vaqueros are the creme and their saddles and gear more practical than the colourful thigh-high boots, high uncomfortable wooden saddles, huge silver spurs and red and green wool ponchos traditionally used by the Chilean Gaucho. Once we were driving north along the Altiplano or Mesa Centrale, from Torreon towards El Paso del Norte over the edge of the Chihuahua desert when we came to an isolated hacienda with a colourful crowd gathered about a corral. We stopped and a much moustachioed, sombrero'd and serape'd gentleman bowed low and bid us welcome and urged us to seats on the stockyard rail. It was a 'Charro' where the skills of the old days of the great haciendas are re-enacted. After a parade a vaquero on a rippling palomino minced past, his serape sweeping the ground along with the horses' tail, but his worn chaps, belt and six-gun showing they were not only for show. A mustang was driven past a full gallop and my lip curled a little, to rope a galloping mustang is no big deal. The vaqueros' wrist twitched, the lariat flew out, his mount jerked back in anticipation and the mustang crashed the ground, roped by the hind heels! That, my friends, was a real cowboy in action!

• Chapter 6 - The Straight and the Square of it

  In such a closed community where every man, woman child and most dogs were known by name and reputation to virtually every soul within a radius of fifty miles, few people would have had much difficulty in ranking their neighbours in order of worth. Probably the most derogatory term was to be labelled "Shiftless", an appellation of heaven knows what origin, perhaps it was derived from "Shirtless" or perhaps it indicated a type of person unwilling to shift for themselves.

  Shiftless people were idle no-hopers or no-gooders, without purpose or direction in life. The hippie generation was thirty or forty years in the future and offhand I couldn't name a single person who deserved such a title. Then, there were people labelled "waisters", not as I thought for years, "wasters" suggesting people who wasted their assets, but from the old days of the naval wars with the French when the incapable, incompetent and unfit were kept in the "waist" of the ship where little skill was needed.

  To be "Straight" meant rather more than merely honest, everybody was honest, even at the age of twenty I had great difficulty in accepting the fact that there were people who would knowingly take that which others had earned. Straight people were not only scrupulously honest and straightforward in their dealing, but their generosity was predictable. Above that were those men who were labelled "Square”. Very few reached this accolade, it meant they stood by their most casual word, faced up to their duties and obligations without wavering, I only really remember one person being given this title of praise.

  It was Showday, held in the Fall on St Patricks Day. Showday meant days of preparation readying farm and kitchen produce, polishing the buggy, and the horse harness, grooming horses, plaiting horse tails and grooming pet calves.

  Trotting into Pembroke to the Showgrounds, tying up the horse in the shade and then joining the enormous crowd that flowed round the Showgrounds, Showday and Xmas Eve being the only two events which drew every man woman and child.

  We were making our way through the crowd, dodging shining horses trotting past, the sounds of the pipeband in our ears, the jangle of music from the Merry-go-round, pausing to greet every second person, to enquire after the latest children, the health of Grandmothers, and of coming marriages. A succession of young girls came up, sometimes dropping a shy curtsey, "How are you, Mrs Gunn?"

  "One of my babies!" Mother would say proudly, (meaning she had delivered her at birth). Then we bumped into a slim young woman of about twenty.

  "Hello, Janet!" said Mother kindly. "And how are things at Glendhu?"

  "They're not - not very good, Mrs Gunn," said the girl in a faltering voice. "We've g-got to g-go!" and she burst into tears. I moved to one side, not needing a suggestive frown to do so, women always seemed to be in tears over some trifle. Mother finished patting the girl on the shoulder, saying, "There, there, I'll see what I can do!" and then she came to me.

  "Have you seen Mr Scaife?"

  "Yes, he was down at the stockyards!"

  "Take me there!" said Mother.

  At the yards, leaning on the rails and looking over the milling Herefords brought down from Cattle Flat for the steer riding was Mr Willis Scaife, not dressed in the usual britches, leggings and spurs but in a grey suit with a tweed hat which he doffed as he stretched out a warm hand.

  "Now, Willis," said Mother. "The last thing I want to do is interfere with what goes on at Glendhu, I know young Jack is a scapegrace and has given you a lot of trouble, but young Janet is a fine girl and she is going to have a baby and they don't have anywhere else to go. Can't you give them another chance for my sake?"

  Mr Willis did not reply for quite some time. He took out some tobacco and rolled it between his palms, and his eye turned to scan the slopes of Ben Roy, as though looking for sheep. Finally he spoke.

  "Well, Mrs Gunn," said he. "You know what the trouble is with young Jack. If he would stay out of the Pub and stop bending his elbow he would be a lot more use to me, to Glendhu and to his wife. But - (then a long pause as he palmed the tobacco), because it's you who have asked me - (another long pause), - I'll give him another chance. But you can tell him if he lets me down again - (another pause) - he'll have to go!"

  Mother put her hand on his arm. "Thank you, Willis," she said simply. "I knew I could rely on you." As we walked back to find young Janet, Mother suddenly stopped and shook her head.

  "I have always said Willis Scaife was Square!" she declared. "Now I know it. If only there were more men like him, what a world this would be! Look there's Janet over there, hurry and catch her!"

  Did Young Jack make good? Sad to say, sixty years later there is no longer a Scaife at Glendhu and probably no one in the world knows! To the modern reader, this may all seem trivial, but it was not. Many of the big runholders (who did not deserve the appellation of "Square" could not have been approached on such an issue; "Mind yer own bloody business!" would have been their response. Then again, only a person of some standing could have interceded. A wrong word and it could have meant the permanent end of a long friendship. Both the terms "Straight" and "Square" are now regarded as derogatory in an age which seems to regard the Victorian obsession with personal honour as totally ridiculous, yet how can our country survive without it?

• Chapter 7

  My Heart's in the Highlands,
  My heart is not here,
  My heart's in the Hielands, a'chasing the deer,
  A'chasing the wild deer and following the roe,
  My heart's in the Hielands, wherever I go!

  In spite of the work of 'Mr Explorer Douglas' and the more adventurous gold prospectors such as Barrington and Arawhata Bill, the maps of pre-war days showed only large blank spaces west of the Alps visible from our back door with the word 'UNEXPLORED' writ large across it.

  The Alps have a magnetism lacking in the brown and purple tussock fern and heather-covered ranges which lie to the east and south. While the "Grandview", the "Pisa Range", the "Dunstan" and others have a certain bleak impressiveness, it cannot compare with the icy majesty of Fog Peak, Treble Cone, Avalanche Peak, Castor and Pollux, or Aspiring itself. In winter, the snow descends to the foot of the hills and the chill never leaves the air even on the warmest day. As the sun goes down behind Cattle Flat the snows glow red and pink, to pearl to rose to flat white in the shade until finally the green flash signals the end of day.

  In the thirties a few mountaineers began penetrating virtually unknown valleys and climbing previously untrodden peaks. Mr Roland Ellis, who was director of Arthur Ellis & Co. in Dunedin and who was a great friend of the Aspinall’s of Mount Aspiring Station began to call as a half way stop between Dunedin and the mountains. His firm made mattresses and later, eiderdowns and overlays and once he showed us an eiderdown sewn together which he said, “'twas much warmer than a blanket when shivering the night away on French Ridge.” This sewn eiderdown was the forerunner of the entire sleeping bag industry.

  They seemed romantic figures, these climbers, dressed in heavy clinkered boots and carrying "swags" and long ice-axes and manila ropes. Scott, Corinne and Roy Gilkisson came for a night, their faces peeling in strips from snow burn after an attempt on Barff above Cascade. Mr E, with sons Murray and Arthur and others came back one night at midnight dressed in any oddments of clothes having been washed out of the Wilkin in heavy rain.

  Murray Ellis had swum the Makarora in the dark to get horses and they all seemed to think it hilarious fun. The local people looked on all this as pure childishness, there was enough work in the world without toiling up mountains to no purpose, the same reaction the Swiss had a century earlier when English gentlemen began "scrambling in the Alps".

  At that stage I looked on a ride from Aspiring Homestead up to Cascade as the ultimate in adventure, any further penetration into the sombre bush-clad valleys seemed a trespass on the possible homes of Little People and heaven knows what. Our passion for mapping every tiny burn and midget tarn has stripped most of the mystery from life, we might well have left alone. One by one I began exploring the valleys to the north and west, not only the West Matuki with the Rob Roy and Gloomy Gorge, but the East Branch, the Kitchener, the Albert Burn, the Wilkin, Siberia, Jumboland, the Haast and others.

  The old walking track from The Neck to Makarora had been roaded, though the road repeatedly slid quietly down the hillside and into the lake, but one could now get to Makarora by car, bicycle or motorcycle and from there a trail lead over the pass, over the Wills River by a wire bridge and on down the gorge to the Burke Flats where the Burke River entered the Haast from the south. Most of the valleys had sign of previous visitors, a blazed trail, or old charred sticks between stones, but no tourists and only rare mountaineers were to be encountered, perhaps the odd deer shooter as I was.

  Cultivated countryside can be pretty enough with park-like hedgerows and trees, green fields and grazing cows, but no one ever stood breathless, gazing at such a scene. But come upon a mountain burn splashing carefree over the glittering mica boulders, the overhanging stately birch trees, the flowering ribbonwoods, a quiet-eyed deer gazing in mild surprise, there is an unspoilt perfection that one can never experience where the hand of man is evident. Eden was lost when man appeared.

  The old Burke Hut stood in a grove of sheltering trees, the inevitable campovens and dixies by the open fire, with dry wood left by the last occupants, two hunters three months before. A crackling fire of dry birch, a bubbling billy of clear water, a pinch of tea and sugar and a relaxing evening sitting on a crude chair made of birch branches and sacking, watching the flickering flames and starting now and then at the grunt of a stag, or the yawp of a morepork or weka, much the kind of evening our forebears enjoyed for the last million years of so. In the morning I took the gun and crossed the Burke and stalked a stag and a group of hinds grazing on the grass between the river boulders. A traitorous waft of the breeze gave me away and he flung up his head with a massive rack of antlers and dashed for a dense grove of birch saplings.

  "You'll not get through there, old boy," said I, and passed up an easy shot to see what would happen. As he reached the wood, he flung back his head so the antlers lay along his back, there was a crash and the saplings parted and he was gone. I had to be contented with one of the hinds, and with a light skin and liver for breakfast, went back to the hut.

  Opposite the Burke, the Landsborough enters the Haast from the north and a few miles west, lies the Clarke. The confluence of the rivers forms an intermontane plain several miles across, grassy, and populated by flocks of paradise ducks, geese, dotterels, and grazing deer. I especially wanted to explore the Landsborough which at first wide and rippling quietly over the stones, was only knee deep but a day or two to the north it became gorged and narrow and roared over boulders and flung spray defiantly into the air.

  Even here, at an obvious campsite under the birch trees there were poles tied for a fly camp and a skin drying rack, shooters had been here within a year or two. Spongy brown duff made a soft bed and the firelight flickered on the overhanging boughs. I had a piece of canvas in case of rain but the peaks of the McKerrow Range jutted against a clear and starry sky. A snow-plastered col at the head of the valley led into the Mount Cook region, later I found that the Mueller Glacier lay beyond it. On the right were the mountains Hopkins and McKerrow of which we made the second or third ascent about ten years later, and the Dark Tower which was still virgin until the 1960's.

  Back down the Landsborough I had barely emerged onto the plain when I decried two horsemen approaching. I leaned on the long rifle and waited. Old Adam Cron, slight, grizzled and white haired rode a horse with a tattered cover and no saddle though his homestead at Haast must have been fifty miles distant.

  "Shootin'?" he said. It was more of a statement than a question.

  "Aye " I nodded.

  "Where are ye from?"

  "Gunn's place, at Alberttown, above the bridge."

  "I know it. Seen any cattle?"

  "Not a one. No fresh sign either."

  He stared about, taking in the vistas of great mountains, forest and rattling river. In that setting it could have been the meeting of Davy Crockett with Lewis and Clarke.

  "Sometimes they stray this far," he said finally. "Well, we'd best get back," and he wheeled his horse.

  "Where are you camped?" I cried after him.

  "At the Roaring Swine," he shouted over his shoulder and soon the two riders were mere bobbing specks across the plain. His bearded companion, dressed in rough tweed and peaked felt hat had not spoken a word. At least he had a saddle. Dusk came on before I reached the Burke hut so I camped under trees again. I shot a paradise duck for supper, but paradise ducks mate for life and the drake was totally distraught and flew in circles landing again and again crying with broken heart to his prostrate mate. I let her lie and have never shot another, a bit of hunger is easier to put up with.

  The Burke Flats are quite unchanged fifty years later, but a tourist highway runs up the valley and bus-loads of Japanese tourists sometimes stop on the bend opposite the Landsborough to take photographs. The deer and the ducks are gone, and somehow it can never be a place where Davy Crockett might meet Lewis and Clarke ever again.

  Deer are sagacious animals as I once found on the hill above Haast Pass on another occasion. Above the bushline little was to be seen apart from an odd chamois and I even crossed the icefields and peered down blue crevasses, half suspecting they might be hiding there! Dropping down toward the Brewster Cirque I came over a knoll in the tussock and three affrighted hinds dashed off down the mountainside. The long-barrelled gun bellowed twice and at the same moment I was conscious of an antlered stag across a hollow to the right. I swung the muzzle in his direction, - and there was absolutely nothing there!

  Shaking my head I stepped a few yards down to where two hinds lay dead, and then came back and sat and stared. And stared! The mountainside curved round towards Mount Brewster and a running stag would have been visible for a clear mile. I threw a stone, the fern on the far bank was only knee high, yet the impression of a twelve or fourteen pointer standing there was too clear to be imagination. I stared some more - and saw a shining eye! He leapt to his feet, with his legs slid under the fern and his antlers pressed back he had been almost perfectly camouflaged. I hesitated a bare moment, - had he earned his freedom? But if deer grew so clever, what of our denuded uplands, - and I pulled the trigger. If only he had shut his eyes!

  I made my way down a dry waterfall into the corrie at the head of Fantail Falls and through a stand of ribbonwoods. Suddenly a rock fell - I was not alone! A whole herd moved upwards across a rock scree, I fired again and again hearing a dull thump when a hit was scored and a crash and shower of sparks when the heavy bullet struck rocks instead, and echoes caromed around the cliffs confusing the deer. The gun was almost too hot to hold when it was all over and long before skinning was finished the dark crept across the bluffs.

  I bedded down for the night on a pile of wet deerskin with the hide of the great stag as blanket. The ice of the glacier above peeped over the cliffs and shone translucent in the light of the brilliant moon and stars.

  Chasing the deer took me into many a remote valley, each a perfect symphony of grassed parkland, blue-green forest, snow-grass alps and basins, blue and white torrents and above, always the blue, green and white snowfields. For some years a companion was Rusty Rawlins, a young school-teacher at Queensberry. He had a decrepit motor cycle and boarded with a local family, but found the limitations of country experience a sore trial.

  "Thank God you have some intelligent conversation!" he said once as we lay on sleeping bags, the faint smell of woodsmoke from the dying fire wafting over us as the stars came out one by one above the peaks. "I mean, I know a rabbit is a fascinating animal, its reproductive powers are unique and stupendous, and it has the cunning of a serpent and the persistence and ruthlessness of Attila the Hun, but as a subject of conversation served up for breakfast, dinner and tea, as well as in the stew, the rabbit has its limitations!"

  Once we went up the Wilkin, fording the Makarora and in a few hours passed the Kerin Forks Hut and then turned left up the main valley which becomes ever narrower and steeper as it passes beneath Aelous (or Mt Oblong as it is sometimes called). Below are the Jumboland Flats and an Alpine Club hut which at one point I had joined in with an Alpine Club party to move to higher ground above an eroding stream. I saw the Jumboland last week from the air, the hut is gone, the idyllic Flats also, churned into a desolation of stone and gravel by two eroding slips. The mountains are like that, the streams and waterfalls often have their beds along fault lines and suddenly a lens of fault breccia is exposed and rubble pours down the stream to spread over the once grassy parkland below. We left our swags here and pressed on through the bush to the Upper flats. Emerging from the bush we saw a dozen deer and after a little stalking, opened fire getting four, the rest dashed for the bush edge.

  “Stop!" I cried and dashed after them, deer will run into cover and then stop for a minute or so to see what all the noise was about. If you are quick, you get them before they move off. I got another three and noticed bits of branches falling from above where they were being trimmed by lead fired from behind and passing all too close overhead.

  "Bloody hell!" I observed, "Don't you know enough to stop shooting when I tell you and start after them.”

  "I could see them moving through the trees!" he said defensively.

  "Maybe!" I said, "But you didn't get any, did you? If you had not made such a I racket I would have got the lot. Oh, well, let’s get skinning!"

  Back down at Jumboland, the twilight was thickening and I stared across the river in unbelief, could all those moving objects be deer? They were and I counted over a hundred. We crossed the river on a wire and stalked them through the trees, the light failing fast. Long before we were in position to get at the main mob, a dozen put their heads over the terrace and stared at us. Here was a problem, did we ignore them and risk their dashing off and startling the main herd, or try for them? We just might get a few lucky head shots. We were not lucky, we both missed, the deer sprang high in the air and bounded off like Springbok, we ran to the edge of the terrace and everywhere were leaping deer, white tails flashing in the dying light. Within seconds all were gone, the largest herd I have ever seen.

  The Wilkin is arguably the handsomest of all valleys and Rusty and I decided on attempting a passage from the East Matukituk over Rabbit Pass into the Wilkin. We hitched a ride up to Aspiring with Jerry Aspinall in the new Bedford truck, this being about 1946, and met a lone deer-shooter called Ray Lagan who was shooting up the East Branch. This was amazing luck as half way up is the Bledisloe Gorge, often called the "Bloody-Slow Gorge" as the recommended route is to climb above the bushline on the Cattle Face and traverse about ten miles before dropping down into the valley, a route guaranteed to take all day. Ray snorted in derision.

  "We have a blazed trail right through the gorge!" he said. "Bet we are in the top flats in four hours!" and he set off in what passes for a walk among deer cullers but by most people would be called a run. We crossed the East Branch just above the Snowy, walked through the south-bank birch-wood to the Kitchener, crossed again and plunged into the gorge. There were ledges and shoulders, mainly low down and we made fast progress, crossing the gorge half way up at a nasty little chute that would obviously not be practical in the rain, and before dark, emerged at the Ruth Flats at Ray's camp. His tent was a pup-tent about two foot high surrounded by chopped wood and stinking deer carcases.

  "It rained for ten days!" said Ray cheerfully, "and I lay in my wet sleeping bag and when I heard a deer walk past, I poked a rifle out the door and got it."

  After the obligatory stew and a brew mainly cooked on our tiny primus, (the wood being too wet to burn), he wrung water out his bag and crawled into it, shivering loudly. It was May and the sun shone for a scant two hours in that narrow valley, but deer skins were worth six shillings a pound and Ray was determined to knock together a cheque.

  Rusty and I pressed on next day and assayed to climb the cirque walls which had been done before, but before long, Rusty, (who was not a rock climber) got into trouble, and in trying to climb above him I found myself in an awkward place. There was only one thing for it, I dropped my pack and ice axe, keeping the rifle. The pack clattered and banged down and landed on a snow patch, the ice-axe shaft dug in and the pack ripped. Thus freed, I got a rope down to Rawlins and we backed off and being unable to see a better route gave it away and climbed Mt Aspinall instead, so we could look down into the dark and remote Albert Burn.

  The next morning I wounded a stag which ran into the ribbonwood and I followed at a run, seeing the odd track and splash of blood and soon found him lying dead. Back at Lagans Camp, Ray was high up the mountainside and he hallooed down from several thousand feet above, 'I'll-be-back-in-four-hours!"

  Rusty replied with some obscene suggestion and the echoes of the reply rang round the bluffs, " - You! - You! – you." In four hours he was down, staggering under the weight of green skins.

  That night and next day it poured with rain and there was fresh snow on the tops and Ray decided to give it away for the winter and it seemed he had an amiable and compliant girl-friend in Christchurch who was exerting a strong magnetic pull even from that distance. Ray ruthlessly loaded us with deer skins but we made a fast trip back to Aspiring Homestead. A day or two later, Jerry A drove us down in the evening to Wanaka. We stopped in the dark near Niger and Jerry came round the back of the truck, "Give us the rifle!" There was a shot and Jerry came back looking pleased, "Two for the price of one!"

  What had seemed to be a lone deer standing in the headlights proved to be two.

  Perhaps the most famous deer stalking valley was the Rob Roy Burn. Jerry would send a party up the lower gorge to take up a position above the bush line while he himself would set off at daybreak, climbing the precipices of Ben Gyle. He would cross a high pass, fire a few shots and the deer herd would break for the bush below, direct into the arms of the shooters stationed behind boulders in front of the bush. As many as 35 deer would be got on a single shoot. One day he gave Rusty his binoculars to take up Rob Roy and they were laid down beside the shooters. The deer were dashing between the shooters and the crossfire got uncomfortably hot and Jerry was slightly rueful to find a fresh bullet hole in his binoculars case.

  I only shot the Rob Roy once. I had spent a few days alone up in the upper Matuki this being the famous occasion when I saw the first Chamois to be seen there, and when a pair dashed up a snow gully up unclimbable bluffs on the northern slopes of Barf near Hector's Col I assayed to climb after them, learning the hard way that one cannot outclimb a chamois. I escaped by glissading down a couloir using the gun butt as a brake.

  Near the bush edge some deer were gathered under a bluff and, resting on a giant moss-covered boulder I opened fire. The deer were confused by the echoes behind and came dashing towards me leaping over the great rock blocks and I got several. The rain came on and I crossed the rising river by running down with the stream, crossed it again on a snow bridge and emerged on Shovel Flat in the gloaming. There is a mile or so of bush between Shovel Flat and the Cascade flats and it was as dark as the pit and no torch. But I did have eight matches and by holding a hand in front of the tiny flame, could make good progress. The moment the match went out, the darkness fell like a curtain, but I emerged onto the star-lit flats as the last one flickered out. A flash of light from the Aspiring Hut warned that visitors had arrived and I put back on my wet shorts which were tied on the top of the pack, and found two Phys-Ed students from Otago in residence.

  Next day, two private shooter , Barney Loach and Alby Collins appeared, not too happy at my presence as they hoped to shoot the upper valley.

  "How many did you get?"

  "Six!"

  "We would have got a dozen!"

  I told them of seeing more than thirty from a distance in the Gloomy and they mused a while at my news of sighting chamois.

  "I thought I might take a look in Rob Roy!" I said carelessly.

  "You won't see many there!" said Loach, but I did not miss the quick look that shot between the two men. So they thought there were quite a few there did they? The next day they left early for the Gloomy and I departed down valley.

  I dropped the pack at the Rob Roy stream and scrambled up above the bush there being good deer trails through the alpine scrub. I only had eight rounds left, and in ones and twos I got seven, one wretched creature taking two shots to finish him off. With the new wet skins my pack weighed 135Ibs and I remember the three hours down to Camerons quite vividly to this day.

  The only other time I ever saw a large herd was in 1946 when my younger brother Tom and I went for a walk up the Greenstone to Howden and the Key Summit, to Home Huts and through the unfinished tunnel to Milford, then down the Hollyford and up the Pike and Lake Alabaster to the Olivine Hut. We battled up the south side of the Olivine gorge and then down an immense shingle slide to the Olivine Flats where we again saw more than a hundred deer, but in those days not a dozen parties had passed that way before. In 1985 I was back with Dr Peter Halfield and Sir Randall Elliott, but we went up the Barrier and over the Four Brothers Pass. Looking across the Olivine Flats the shingle slide of forty years before had gone, vegetation spreading over it. We passed around the high level route into the Forgotten and camping high above on the bush line, saw three deer in the early morning, the only ones seen in two weeks. The helicopter gun ship has almost exterminated them but it would be sad to see the deer gone entirely, along with the kea the deer add a richness to the mountains.

• Chapter 8 - Isolation

  No small community in any country will ever again exist in a world bounded by the surrounding hills. Young Chinese in Inner Mongolia wear jeans and complain about difficulty in getting the latest pop records; I have sat round a yak-dung fire in Tibet with sheep-skin coated Tibetan traders drinking char in a black yurt and discussed the seating capacity of Jumbo jets. Admittedly only two of us present had ever seen an aeroplane, but still! But in the Twenties and Thirties the outside world was rarely mentioned and most news passed by word of mouth. Some people actually had daily papers sent from Dunedin, delivered three times a week and days late but the most popular was the illustrated Auckland Weekly. The Christmas issues especially showed pictures of the rest of New Zealand, of steam trains panting up to Otira or round the Raurimu spiral, of people camped on beaches, of farmlands obviously greener than our brown hills. It all had an unsettling effect and after the war when I acquired a motorcycle, I set out to see more of our own country for myself.

  Few people born locally had been beyond Dunedin or possibly Christchurch, I was probably the first of my generation to visit the North Island, if we except those sent there in the Armed Forces. Radios began appearing about 1930. The Morris's invited us to a listening session, the radio being an immense black box about three feet long with valves that stood nearly a foot high while the speaker must have been two feet across. Young Dave and Lin Morris enthusiastically tuned condensers and finally produced faint scratchy music coming from, they said, Dunedin. Then after much more fiddling a distorted voice which was claimed to emanate from Auckland, a place at the very north of New Zealand! It left me rather bemused, why should people bother with it?

  Mother especially, missed music as she and her brothers had formed their own string and piano quartet, in fact the three had been Marine bandsmen. We could not afford a piano but finally did get an HMV gramophone. Mother went into raptures over Gilbert & Sullivan, and to have lived in London at the turn of the century with this series of delightful light opera’s coming out at the Albert Hall, as well as the Prom concerts, the scandalised joy of a younger generation excited by Gilbert's sly needling of the ponderous establishment, must have generated a delight never before known.

  The distorted noise coming from a scratched record meant little to me, though I was entranced by family groups singing "Mot her Machree" or "The Road and the Miles to Bonny Dundee" round the piano, and by the occasional fiddler or piper. To this day folk songs sung or danced to fiddle, piano, or accordion are to me real music, electronic guitars are an artificial noise! We had a total absence of interest in the rest of the world . Who could possibly care who was the King of France, whether there was a riot in Lebanon or a famine in China? One of the few pieces of outside news came when the old king died in 1936 and people stood in silent groups, for once shocked at the loss of that paternalistic figure.

  We were not unfamiliar with Royalty, a few years before the Prince of  Wales had toured the country which must have been a strenuous exercise over appalling roads. When the entourage reached the punt across the river half a mile below our place, Jack Lange, the puntman and an ex-goldminer had taken a glass too many. In a word, he was drunk, nevertheless he put the heavy rudders over and the massive punt built on two steel hulls stemmed the current and reached the Hawea shore safely. The Prince stepped ashore and called for "Three cheers for Jack Lange" which were given with a will and his cheerful acceptance of the situation endeared him to all.

  As he said later of himself; "I may not be a great brain, but I have a touch with people!" He did better than his brother the Duke of York a few years later. We children were lined along the street in Pembroke on a cold winters day with the snow down on Ben Roy. The car came from Queenstown over the Crown Range and arrived an hour late. The Duke stepped out, glanced at the people and remarked "It was damned cold and it would be better inside," and vanished into the Hotel.

  "If that's Royalty," said Mrs Morris, who knew bad manners when she saw them, "You can keep it!" and in fact few people ever felt warmly towards George the VI. Two years later the Duke of Gloucester passed through and left a rather better impression.

  The news we were really much more interested in travelled by word of mouth, just possibly enhanced a little on the way, and was recounted at smoko breaks while we leaned against a wagon wheel and tossed sticks into the billy fire, or sat on a wheat sheaf or perched on a wool bale. In the background horses champed on chaff and tossed their nose bags about, sheep baaed and took no notice, but the dogs always crept in closer as if they wanted to be part of the human circle.

  "Terrible goin's on, up at Cattle Flat," said old Arthur Wilson, wiping crumbs from his mouth with the back of a leathery hand. "Did you hear how the stock inspector was up there last Saturd'y? No one about, so he knocks at the door of one of the men's huts. Bang! Bang! Two bullets come through the wood, so he kicks open the door and there is one of the cowhands sittin' on a bunk with a bottle of whisky in one hand and a pistol in the other! If Old Dave don't keep a tighter hand on them larrikins up there somebody'll go too far one of these days I reckon!"

  It should be added, people seldom did. On one occasion at Cattle Flat, apparently someone pulled a gun, a bystander not liking where it was pointing, slammed the gun down, and the gunman shot himself in the foot!

  "I can't say I entirely approve of Mr Aubrey," Mother would say primly, "But," (she would never fail to add), "I must say, he has a good seat on a horse!" This arose from an incident when a Cattle Flat herd was being driven along the Alberttown road when they broke and went through our fences . Without a pause, Aubrey put his cowpony straight at our front five-barred gate and thundered round the stampeding cattle, whip snapping. To have a good seat on a horse was one of the Victorian hallmarks of a gentleman.

  "He can ride," old Arthur admitted. "But didyer hear about Mac Templeton comin' through there the other day? Here is old Dave with a horse snubbed by a halter to a post in the stockyard and he was stirrin' it round with a stockwhip!"

  “What the hell yer doin', Dave ?” says Mac.

  “Breakin' this horse in,” says Dave.

  “Yeah , you're breakin' him alright,” says Mac, “But I don't know about the "in"!' Pity too, there's some good horseflesh on that place." For some reason, Cattle Flat, perhaps being one of the bigger stations and perhaps because of its tempestuous owner, seemed to provide more than its share of smoko-break gossip.

  "Did y' hear how Miss Edna went on a trip to Australy and met this singin' cowboy feller?" Old Arthur began on another occasion. "Well, she invited him to visit Daddy's station, so he turned up in Pembroke and found no way to get there, so borrowed a horse. Then he opens his swag and pulls out chaps and a sombrero and six guns and dresses up and rides into the yard strummin' a guitar! They tell me the stockmen on the place damn near died!"

  The Second World War left Old Dave embittered. His eldest son, Young Dave, was one of the crew of a Wellington bomber damaged over Germany and it came down in the North Sea. Young Dave, the story goes, got several of the crew into a life raft and then dived back into the floating plane to try to get the pilot, when it sank. When you have a big property and have looked forward to your son taking over, a medal is a poor consolation! Men to work on back-country stations were in short supply in the war and I remember seeing a Cattle Flat herd being driven by Miss Edna and young Dave before he went into the Airforce. He sat hunched in the saddle whistling the dogs, while Miss Edna rode ahead warning cars and blocking side roads. All the same the two of them drove the herd to Gore (Arthur Scaife says it was Burnside) and they probably spent more than a week on the trail.

  "Old Dave can be a bit rough with the tongue," said one of the Scurr boys of Cardrona (a grandson of one the Geordie Gang of the mining days). "Last year, in the Fall muster all the men quit and Old Dave is down in Pembroke offering double wages for men to muster Cattle Flat. Well, you know how it is, you might not care to work for a man, but you can't leave his sheep out on the hill when the snow is coming. So we all took our horses and dogs and mustered the whole hill from the Twins to Niger. No, you can't leave a man's sheep out. But you don't have to take his money either!"

  Old Dave must have taken it hard! To refuse a man's money is to say, "I won't trade with the likes of you!" and you can't knock a man down who has just saved you 8,000 head of sheep! Aubrey could get rough when provoked. One Show Day a drunk was pestering him and Old Dave flung him to the ground and stood astride him, booted, spurred and scowling.

  "I won't hit a man in your condition, but by God that's what you'll get if you come near me!" he growled.

  "Young Rod is a rough chip off a bloody rough block!" said another shearer. "We were mustering from Niger Hut one morning and the boys were just finishing breakfast when, Blam! a bullet comes through the roof. Young Rod steps in the door. 'Just thought I'd wake you up' he says. I'd left for the hill already or I woulda kicked his arse!"

  However, Mr Aubrey was always polite to Mother, I can never recall him not lifting his hat and greeting her courteously, to which she would reply politely if coolly. We only once had a run in with him and that was over a sheep-worrying dog. Aubrey bred Great Dane dogs as well as racehorses and cowponies and had given or sold one to a woman who lived only a mile or so away. Early one morning Father was awakened by the barking of dogs and as we had had several instances of worrying took a rifle to investigate. Two dogs including the Great Dane had killed fourteen sheep and were pulling down more. The rifle was only a .22 cal and the dog ran several hundred yards off our property before collapsing. The whole matter hinged on the fact that while you may legally shoot a dog in the act on your property, you may not follow it home and shoot it there. The owner refused to pay for the sheep and claimed it had not been shot in flagrante delicto so it all ended up in court in Cromwell.

  The court was packed with runholders as the matter of sheep-worrying was close to the hearts of all. The most appalling thing not only to me was to hear the opposing lawyer casually dismiss Father's evidence as untrue! Father's face went pink but he controlled himself with an effort as a scandalised growl went round the court, one did not call a grown man a liar unless one was exceedingly tired of life. Aubrey gave evidence that the Great Dane was nothing but a spaniel in disguise.

  "I've seen him lying in the yard with thousands of sheep milling round and he wouldn't even look at them!" he declared.

  "But surely Mr Aubrey," said the Judge. "Great Danes are very powerful animals are they not?" Old Dave's pride got the better of him at this point. "Oh God, yes, yer honour!" he cried, "Why, I've seen him pull down a Poly Bull!" The court roared, and that was the end of it, though I don't think we ever collected the value of the sheep lost.

  "The cheek of that damned lawyer," said Lin Morris to me. "As I said to Cotton Rowley, Tom Gunn could no more tell a lie than he could fly!" It all became one of Old Arthur's best stories.

  For twenty years after WW2, the war was retaught round the campfires and shearing sheds, but the veterans of WW1 rarely mentioned it and it slowly became clearer why not. Occasionally something would be let slip almost by accident. Old Arthur Wilson and Father got on very well, the Wilsons being descended from William Gunn in the 13th Century so that they were distant cousins. Old Arthur often did our shearing or helped with the hay and a good deal of leg-pulling and barracking went on.

  "The War!" Arthur would cry, snipping wool from a sheep's skull. "Ye wasn't really at The War, were ye Tom? I though ye were with them Aussies in funny hats that just rode round looking at it!"

  "Gentlemen!" said Father. "Not just 'Aussies'. Gentlemen of the Light Horse and Men of other units! At least that's what the Governor of West Australia called us!"

  "Sounds a good start," Arthur chuckled, slicing wool round a shoulder. "What did he say for a follow up?"

  "We couldn't hear for the boos from the 'other units'", Father admitted.

  "I bet" said Arthur, "The Eggisacook, that's what we called them, on account of that funny badge like a fried egg and the chicken feathers!"

  "The Rising Sun," said Father proudly, "and a spray of genuine Kangaroo feathers, very hard to get these days!" (I later found his Rising Sun Badge and Emu feather badge in his old steamer trunk.)

  "Now, now, you silly old dear!" Arthur would reprove as the helpless sheep began to kick. "Never swear at 'em I say, it shocks 'em to the core. Hold still, you - - -! Yes, the Aussies were very pretty and all that but the only real fightin' they ever did was at the Battle of the Wasir! You did a good job there too, I seen it, whole blocks burnt to the ground. Could never understand why the Gyppo firemen let it spread through half Cairo!"

  "We did our best to help put it out," Father said, "But their hoses were kinked so we had to cut 'em! But I tell you, the Gyppos learnt a lesson, they never touched an Australian again! I could walk through the worst back-streets of Cairo and they would just back away."

  "Them Aussies were just a bunch 'o hooligans," said Arthur pushing a sheep out a porthole. "You even took on the Pom Army once, didn't you Tom?"

  "Damned swine!" cried Father fiercely. "Their damned Redcaps, picked up one of our men drunk, took him to their camp and lashed him to a wagon wheel, out in the desert sun!"

  "What did you do ?" I asked curiously, tossing a handful of belly wool into a bale.

  "We all mounted up and a few hundred of us rode through their camp," said Father. "Cut him loose, throw him over the pommel and away! They weren't going to touch our men!"

  "You know," said Arthur reflectively, oiling a whetstone. "If you'd only a took on the Germans and Turks the same way, the war would ha' been over in a week!"

  "Ha!" said Father. "Who was it turned the machine guns on the Poms when they started surrendering at Gallipoli? Who was it? Your little Newzies, that's who! Butter wouldn't melt in their mouths, oh no! But who was it machine-gunned the Poms?"

  "Chunuk Bair!" cried Old Arthur, all thoughts of shearing abandoned . "Do you know how many men the Wellingtons lost, taking Chunuk Bair ? Four hundred! And the Poms that relieved them were going to surrender it next day! I wasn't there, I was at the Daisy Patch, but I tell you if I had been, I'd a machine-gunned them too, an' so would you!"

  "That would I!" cried father. "At Lone Pine every man of the Eighth and Ninth Light Horse lay dead in front of us and through the glasses we could see the Porns at Suvla Bay, swimming! Swimming, I tell you, while our men died like flies, to 'create a diversion'. By God! I tell you if our guns had had the range I would have turned them on them!"

  "Aye, Aye," mused Arthur, "And there were more dead Otago Rifles at the Daisy Patch than there were daisies too!" They stood tense and silent awhile, and finally Old Arthur sighed.

  "Oh, well, there's a lot of water gone under the bridge." He straightened and stared at a distant little yellow truck trailing a mile of dust. "Now what do you think Old Bill McPherson is goin' to Hawea Flat for again? That's the second time this week! Think he's got somethin' goin' over there? Now, where's the tea billy?"

  Some things in the past, I began to understand, were too terrible to be spoken of and only rarely did some event break the silent wall, in fact I doubt war was mentioned again until WW2 broke out. Both my elder brother and I took it for granted that we would go though I was only fifteen and he barely eighteen.

  "You'll not go!" said Father in some passion. "I tell you, I've seen twelve hundred men die in an hour! Twelve-hundred of the best men that God ever put breath in body! And why? Because some Brass-Hat thought a 'diversion' was needed so the Poms could land at Suvla Bay. And did they use it to get every yard they could inland? Like hell! They made themselves comfortable dugouts and went swimming while the Turks rushed up men by

  the division while our men’s lives were thrown away like chicken feed! We were in deep captured Turkish trenches with only a few points low enough to get out and the Turks had their machine guns lined up on them! The Eighth went over the Top and not a man got fifty yards, then the Ninth went and not a man got fifty yards. Then it was our turn. I had my foot in my corporal's hand for a leg up when our Colonel rushed back from Headquarters to say he had got it stopped."

  "Then what happened?” said I, appalled.

  "They called back the battleships to shell the Turkish trenches. The 'Queen Lizzie' was lobbing sixteen-inch shells screaming over our heads and there was no way we could tell them if they fell short! Then what was left of us went at them again, up the hill towards that damned pine tree!"

  "Did you get there ?" I said in a whisper.

  "Oh, we got there. Some of us! The Turks were down in bunkers roofed with pine logs and we had to stand out in the machine-gun fire, throw in grenades, tear up the logs with our bare hands and drop in to fight it out with the bayonet! The Turks surrendered when there was not one unwounded man standing. He was tough was Johnny Turk!"

  "What did you do then?" I asked in trepidation. I could imagine some brutal retribution, perhaps helpless wounded put to the bayonet or even darker deeds.

  "We propped them up, gave them cigarettes and bandaged them," said Father.

  "But why?" I said, mystified.

  "Because we just could never have believed it," said Father simply as though that explained all.

  "Believed what?" said I, mystified.

  "That there were men alive who could stand up to an ANZAC charge," said Father, shaking his head as though it were still beyond belief. "The Germans couldn't face the cold steel, and as for the Austrians and Rumanians, ha! But Johnny Turk gave us as good as he got. No, we would never have believed it!"

  The ANZAC confidence that they were "The Best" also seemed to show itself in an intolerance to insult or lack of respect on the part of inferior people, which included most of the human race. On their voyage to New Zealand in 1922 their ship called at Suez and Mother and Father visited his old haunts in Cairo. An Egyptian made an insulting remark and spat on the ground in front of Mother. Father, still attired in cavalryman's riding britches and carrying his riding crop, promptly administered a thrashing on the spot and kicked the unfortunate "Gyppo" off down the street. Mother was somewhat taken aback!

  "Only thing they understand!" said Father shortly.

  "In 1915 there was a riot in Cairo," said Father on another occasion. "We got news that three-thousand of them were going to burn Shepheard's Hotel and I was told to disperse it. Walk! Trot! Charge! We rode boot to boot down the street at full gallop and the Gyppos just vanished into their warrens!"

  "How many men did you have?"

  "A troop!"

  "How many men are there in a troop?"

  "Thirty-two – how many do you think it takes to scatter a few damned Egyptians?

  But never did he look so proud as when having his photo taken with a uniformed son on each side!

• Chapter 10

  One evil day, I think during the War, Mother came home from a visit to Glendhu where the Scaife’s were also great friends with the Aspinall’s of Mount Aspiring.

  "Poor old Mr A. has got cancer and is going to have an operation," she said shaking her head. "I do hope he'll be alright!"

  I was not overly worried, after all, Mr A. could rope a Poly Bull, no mere disease was going to affect a man like that much! But odd news snippets continued to be bad and Mother began vanishing to Mount Aspiring for weeks at a time to nurse him. In typical back-country fashion, others extended help, Murray Ellis spent weeks at Mount Aspiring to help with the roundup, young Arthur Scaife managed the whole run on his own for a time when the family accompanied Mr A. to Dunedin for major surgery. Later he was to say, "It was at Aspiring, on my own, that I found out what isolation meant!"

  Finally Mr A. went to Dunedin for yet another operation and weeks later Mr Roland Ellis telephoned to say that he was on his way home. Mother and I went to visit him in Pembroke at the hotel where he had stayed the night rather than make the extra journey to our place. I was shaken to see the pale features on the normally mahogany-faced old cattleman and his hair had greyed, but his lopsided grin was as cheerful as ever and his handshake, as he leaned across the bed and stretched out a pyjama-clad arm, was as hard as ever. "How are ye, Lad?"

  "Fine, fine, Mr A.," I said tremulously. "It’s jolly good to see you back! Did you know Jerry brought the cattle down last week?"

  "Oh, it'll be grand to get back to Aspiring, Missus Gunn," he said to Mother. "I never wa' a see the inside of a hospital again!" Mother went up to Aspiring for two weeks and came back looking stricken.

  "Old John is so brave," said she. "He insisted we all ride up to Cascade, I said 'you shouldn't, you know John, you're not strong and it will shake you up.' And do you know what he said ? He said; ' Yes I know, Miz Gunn, but I want to see Mount Aspiring one more time, and you never know, it might be my last ride!' And he laughed! He laughed as he said it! And he knows, he knows, it’s true, he'll never ride again! Oh, poor old Jack!" and Mother, who must, while at St. Mary' s in 1914-18, have seen death in all its worst forms, fairly broke down.

  A few weeks later, John Aspinall, the last of our back country pioneers, died. My most precious possession to this day, is the old long-barrelled Lee Enfield that Mr A. took with him to Mount Aspiring after the First War. Even now, if I close my eyes I can see him riding hell for leather, dodging through the trees in the orchard with the string of horses in front, manes and tails flying.

  The next summer, Mr E. and family stayed quietly in the caravan by the river (where they now have a house), the usual hilarity of preparation for the excursion up-valley forgotten.

  "You should go to Aspiring, Son," said Mother. "Mr A. was your friend and the others would like to see you!"

  Mr E. shook his head morosely, "It just isn't the same without old Jack!" he said, and it was true, the world had become a poorer place. 

• Chapter 11 - Gold Mining

  We were all brought up on tales of the romantic era of goldmining which through the seventies saw thousands of miners working alluvial claims along rivers and streams and later in the old placers on the shoulders and terraces left as outwash from the Pleistocene glaciers. By 1885, especially in the Shotover and Arrow, the emphasis had shifted to hard rock mining of the quartz reefs, headframes and winding houses dotted the valleys, stampers crushed the quartz, berdans milled it fine and cyanide dissolved out the gold.

  The alluvial gold continued to be won, but mainly by hydraulicking, that is, washing down the alluvium with high pressure water jets from the banks and terraces down through the sluice boxes and by dredges digging out the deeper layers of the gravel banks and on the river flats. By the twenties and thirties to be sure, one might still see a few old rusted steel plates along the sides of the Cardrona, but it was hard to believe that half a dozen dredges had worked here only forty years before. The Cardrona however, may only be an ankle deep creek at times, but at others it can be a foaming tide half a mile wide moving thousands of tons of gravel an hour so that one flood and most of the traces of mining had gone.

  The banks of the Clutha along the old Dunstan Diggings, at Bendigo, at Bannockburn, along the terraces above the Kawarau, at Arrowtown and in the Shotover were and are still pock-marked with drives, adits, winzes and shafts, stone walls of the 'Stone Rooms' and scoured basins where the hydraulickers had been, while sagging old wire cages still spanned the rivers but of gold left we rarely saw a colour. The Austral-Malay dredge at Lowburn clanked away reducing green river flats to barren heaps of spoil, destroying the land forever; we supposed they were recovering gold but we never saw it.

  Jack Edgerton who used to live on the Waikaia had done some mining and like many others was fascinated by locating the "Mother Lode", the fancied parent quartz reef that all the gold came from. He drew lines on maps linking all the main diggings and marked out the location of the Mother Lode in Red.

  "It's got to be there!" he would say, prodding the map. "Look, no gold has been found above here on the Waikaia, it's here, here and here. Nothing west of Moke Lake and Lochnagar, nothing north of the Cardrona, the Lode must lie across here!" Of course there is no single Mother Lode. All sedimentary rocks have a few parts per million of gold in them, and if buried deep enough for the temperature to rise to about 350 degrees the quartz migrates through the rock and reforms along bedding planes and faults to form great nodes of massive quartz, and the gold goes with it. The rub is, how much gold was in the original rock? The Otago reefs seem to be concentrated in the "Greenschists" which have a higher content of ferromagnesians due to volcanic material and perhaps also a higher gold content. So predicting where gold might be is still a chancy business.

  Gold is soft, but of all the materials God made, it is the most durable. It can lie buried in gravel for five million years, as bright and shining as the day it was made. For the whole of recorded history men have been fascinated by gold, yet it seems that the Maori’s who painstakingly searched these rivers for greenstone, never noticed it.

  The old people told stories of Fox and his partners up the Arrow gorge and of how other miners, guessing he was on to a good thing, tried to follow him when he came out to "The Junction" for supplies, and how he eluded them, until one day a sharp-eyed man saw smoke rising from beyond the Arrow Gorge, and hundreds of miners poured over the hills and tried to elbow Fox and his men off their claims. Pegs were pulled out of the ground, but Fox was a large man and not easily dominated, in fact prior to their discovery, any man who broke their self-imposed rules had one penalty to face, he had to fight Fox!

  "Now, men!" said the Queenstown constable, firing his pistol into the air. "We won't tolerate any nonsense here. Let Fox and his men mark out their claims, the rest of you stand back there, and when I fire again you can race and claim any part of the beach left!"

  Then there was the tale of the newchum arriving on the Cardrona and asking how one found a gold claim.

  "Go up the mountain there and pull up the tussock and you'll find the gold growing on the roots!" he was told. So up the slopes of Criffel he went, and pulled up a tussock, and there, underneath, the gold nuggets "shone like the stars of Orion on a winter's night!" as Hartley & Riley said of their first find at Gabriels' Gully. Old Hector Halliday swears this really happened and the newchum was his father, John Halliday, fresh out from Dumfriesshire, and certainly both he and the unrelated gangling Roger Halliday worked on the Criffel Diggings and cruel hard it was, the men having to hump sacks of frozen paydirt down the mountainside to water to wash up.

  Once, when I was over 'on the Coast' I took it into my head to find some gold for a wedding ring. After all, didn't Mr Peter Graham himself tell me of the claim at the mouth of the Callery where one party washed up 14 pounds weight of gold after a week’s sluicing? Actually, Mr Peter was not only a fund – of stories about goldmining, but he used to carry round in his pocket a nugget about the size of an old-fashioned pocket watch.

  "Back about the late twenties," said Mr Peter, "there wasn't much cash about and we used to do a bit of prospecting. Alec and I went over the Buster and dropped into the head of the Callery, and I was standing on some glaciated rock just above the river looking for a place to cross, when I saw something twinkling in a pool of water and here was this nugget jammed in a crack. And only feet away there was another almost as big!"

  One night in the bar at Waiho, someone said "Can I show Jack here your nugget, Mr Peter?" and the nugget was passed from hand to hand.

  "Well," said Mr Peter, "after half an hour I forgot about it and didn't realise I hadn't got the nugget back until next morning, and there had been about forty people there that night. But, late in the morning, someone came up and said, ‘ls this your nugget, Mr Peter?’” Lucky we have honest people on the Coast!"

  "How do you find the stuff?" said I to another old West Coast miner. "I mean, it doesn’t just lie on the roads. How do you know where to look?"

  "It’s not easy, lad," he wheezed. "It's the Maori stones you have to look for, when you find Maori stones, the gold's not far away!"

  "What do you mean, Maori stones, you old fool!" said I with more irritation than tact. "Don't tell me the Maori’s left markers just so you can come along and find it?"

  "I dunno, lad," he coughed, shaking his head. "There's all kinds of Maori stones, there's black ones and brown ones and yellow ones and red and some are sort of yellow green. Aye, you find them, and you'll be near the gold!"

  I debated this with Steven Graham, who at least was not in his dotage.

  "He's right, you know," Steven opined. "I've seen Maori stones up the Callery. Why don't we go up the Callery and work the cracks?" We toiled through the bush, swinging from roots of rata trees along the Callery gorge, laden with packs, a rope, a miners dish, bits of wire and other accessories. We finally roped down a bluff onto polished schist only feet above the roaring torrent, and believe me of all the roaring torrents that have ever roared, the Callery is King. Steven went down on his knees with a bit of bent wire, raking the contents of cracks in the rocks, into the dish. Of course, the cracks act like natural riffles. I scooped up some water and washed up, and there were the Maori stones, as I live and breathe! There were black grains of magnetite, brown ilmenite, yellow pyrite, red garnet, yellow-green chalcopyrite and some specks of gold.

  "The senile old idjit!" I raved. "His 'Maori stones' are just the heavy concentrates, of course you find gold along with the other heavies!"

  "Well," said Steven calmly. "That's what he told you, isn't it? He just hadn't heard of terms like "Heavy concentrates!"

  Down at Gillespie's Beach there used to be a lot of gold, until a dredge took out about twenty million pounds worth. It is fine stuff and has been mainly washed out of the old moraine banks that form cliffs, by the gale-driven sea. At the southern end resided old Jock Thompson in a little tin hut. Mick Sullivan of Fox lent me the clapped-out Chevrolet without brakes that passed for a tourist bus at Fox.

  "Going to visit old Jock?" asked Mick. "Go into the Hotel kitchen and get some bread to take him !" He is a good chap, Mick, rank Irisher though he be. I abandoned the car near a swamp only yards from the crashing surf and wandered along the shining sand until I saw smoke rising above the flax bushes against the towering white pines. A seal yapped, and resentfully took to the water where another floated serenely on its back, toes crossed and flippers folded across its chest. Jock rested on a box outside the hut, pipe in hand, feet bare, straw hat pulled down.

  "Tell us all about it, Jock," I said, and he wittered on for quite some time.

  "The Five Mile beach was the best," he said. "Ar, we did real well there. I had a mate you know, and one night in the pub, he bet a case of champagne, that his claim would go an ounce to the shovel! Well, we took him up, and we all went down, and he dug a shovel of paydirt and we washed it up." At this point, old Jock laughed until his eyes ran. "And he lost, he lost you know, lad, it only went twenty one pennyweights!"

  "Not bad though," said I. "About $500 for a shovel of gravel. Been getting anything on the beach lately?"

  "I'll show ye, lad." said he, picking up a shovel. We went out on the beach and found a layer of black sand where the magnetite had been concentrated by the waves. He scooped it up and we went on to a pond of fresh water where he wiffled the shovel about like a dish. He had a curious trick of washing away the last traces of sand from the gold by squirting water from his hand, a trick not as easy as it looked. There on the shovel was a patch of tiny gold-flakes, two inches across!

  "It’s very fine, ye know boy," said Jock. "No weight to it at all!" He had a short sluice lined with velvet and he washed the concentrate down with buckets of seawater. Back in his hut over tea, he pointed out his crucible with a long spout.

  "Ye picks up the gold with mercury after ye washes it outa the velvet, ye knows." he went on. "It forms an amalgam or somethin' like that. Then you have to heat it real hot to distil the mercury out, it takes tawa or maire, ye knows, only wood hot enough to drive off the mercury!" Later, I used to bring tourists down and old Jock would show them his little trick, and their eyes would glow at the sight of the patch of gold, (which Jock would never bother to keep).

  "So you knew Jock Thompson?" said Harold Wellman to me at a Geological conference, years later. "You really knew old Jock?"

  "Of course I knew bloody Jock Thompson!" said I. "Twice as large as life and three times as unwashed. Where did you meet him?"

  "Have you read 'From Abut Head to Milford Sound'?" Wellman demanded.

  "Of course," said I. It was a magnificent story of the geology of the extremely inaccessible country of the West Coast, and set Wellman, along with Dick Willett on the path to a certain fame. The title had a nice ring to it, and I rather copied it in some work we did in the Antarctic, "From Mawson Glacier to Mu lock Inlet", except some bureaucrat changed it.

  "Well," said Wellman. "Old Jock came with us as guide and roustabout for the two years it took. He was a great old chap. Did he ever tell you the story about the mate of his that bet the case of champagne... ?"

• Chapter 12 - The Neighbours

  Neighbours were not very obvious at "The Poplars", from the door of the Stone Cottage one could see smoke rising from the Smiddy at Templetons, but no other house was visible. To the east, over the river and over the Hawea, bare terraces dotted with manuka stretched almost to the foot of the Grandview’s, north over the river the same with the yellow tussock slopes of Mount Brown that was part of the Mt. Burke run.

  To the north-west our land stretched for a couple of miles almost to the river outlet from Lake Wanaka, but much of it was scrub-covered gravel and unfenced. On the very top of the most barren and wind-swept ridge of all, less than half a mile from the lake was a house of corrugated iron, little better than a hut, on some land owned by a family called Anderson. Old Bill Anderson ran no stock except the odd horse, he probably could not afford the fencing to keep out the rabbits, and he made a precarious living, shearing, mustering, on the roads, rabbitting, especially the latter, so that he was known, not so politely as "Old Rabbitty Bill!" Though he occasionally was known to take a glass too many, he was far from being the drunken old reprobate some claimed, in fact he was an honest and hard worker but always dressed in torn trousers stained with sheep-wool grease and an ancient tweed coat with the most battered old felt hat one was ever likely to see.

  Once he was shearing at Makarora, thirty miles away, and when he came home for the weekend his bicycle broke down and I passed him walking back on the Sunday afternoon, walking with a quick shuffling stride that would see him back at the Lakehead before midnight. His incredibly seamed and lined face was always unshaven yet I could wish that workers of his ilk were still available. I was later at high school with his eldest son, Roland, and was pleasantly surprised by his wit and shrewdness. A poor family in those days could still produce good stuff.

  West was more unfenced land on Yorke's Knob, owned by the Wiley brothers whose name became their actions. Some of our sheep were turned out 'on the hill' and went missing and Father suspected where they went. With the stock inspector and a policeman, the Wiley’s were made to bring in all their sheep and there were fifty odd with fresh ear-marks, our mark being a single slot and theirs the same slot with a nick in one side! Mother often bottle-fed motherless lambs and bottle-fed sheep don't forget. One of them, seeing Mother, hurdled a fence and rushed up, baaing loudly.

  "There's one as seems to know you!" observed the Stock Inspector. But nothing could be proved, so all that could be done was have the Wiley’s change their ear-mark, though Father took them to one side and "had a quiet word with them!"

  There were other incidents, once we rode over to the back of Mount Iron for a picnic with the Weatherall family, who had the land to the south-west. The older boys went for a walk up Mount Iron and came back to say the Wiley’s were mustering sheep on our hill. But by some strange event, no rifles had been brought, and the Wiley’s stood Father and Mr Weatherall off by rolling down rocks! On another occasion they were found moving sheep off our land, and Father, mounted, charged, swinging a manuka baton. They left quite quickly. Worst of all, one winter Father had laid a poison line for rabbits, near the boundary with Bill Anderson and the Wiley’s. In the early morning, instead of a trail of fifty or a hundred stiff rabbits with skins worth a shilling each, there were oval impressions in the frost and the marks of hobnailed boots!

  "If I see the swine today, I'll get them!" gritted Father, jamming shells into the 3030 Winchester early next morning.

  "Now, now, Daddy!" chided Mother anxiously. "A few rabbits are not worth a man’s life!"

  Father paused. "All right," he said finally, "I won't shoot them but, by - I'll put the fear of God into somebody!" and he swung into the saddle and departed giving a weird yell, the battle cry of the Australian cavalry.

  Some years later we were in Wanaka and I was left holding the horse's head by the gnarled old willow in the street near the hall, opposite the hotel. A man came by, pushing a bicycle, a roughly dressed, foxy-faced fellow with a battered old tweed cap. He had the fawning, ingratiating manner that puts one on one’s guard.

  "Now whose rig would this be?"

  "Mr Gunn’s,” said I shortly.

  "What?'' he said, stepping back. "What!" he cried, glancing fearfully round. "Tom Gunn’s, from Alberttown ?" and he shot a furtive glance up the street where Father could be seen striding down.

  "Here he comes now if you want to speak to him," said I.

  Instead, my acquaintance flung himself on his bicycle and pedalling furiously shot off down the hill and wobbled round the road towards the Point. "What did Jack Wiley want?" asked Father grimly, coming up.

  "Was that him?" said I, wondering. "Why did he run like that?"

  "Because he had good reason to!" said Father shortly. "Get aboard, we're going home!"

  The Weatherall family also lived in a corrugated-iron house on the road to Wanaka and their farm included a corner of Mount Iron. There was absolutely no water on their land but they were a family of incredibly hard workers and with the aid of netting fences and merciless trapping of rabbits they were able to run a few hundred sheep. Stafford, of my age, came to the same school a mile away by horse and one white winter's morning, he was late.

  "Why?" asked the teacher. Staff, all of twelve years of age, looked down and scuffed shoes.

  "Had to look my traps," said he finally.

  "Oh," said the teacher. "How many did you get?"

  "Forty-five!" said Staff, as though it were an everyday thing for a schoolboy to make half a week’s wages before school. He came to high school for a year and then left to make money. For a year or two he trapped in winter and shore sheep in summer, then National Mortgage financed him into buying Lake Ohau Station for only 12,000 pounds, it having few fences and only an old house in rather bad repair. Then came the Korean war and the jump in wool prices and within two years Staff owned the property lock stock and barrel. Then he married the only daughter of the property next door! Go today along Lake Ohau and see the new barns and homestead, the well-housed implements and tractors, a row of motel units, the well grassed paddocks, hard work made them all!

  Down-river a mile were the Templetons, whose grandfather was another Lowland Scot who began life in the district pit sawing lumber up the lake. Mr Charley Templeton was the blacksmith and in many ways a remarkable man. Thick, heavy-set, dour, with the massive arms of the smith, he seemed to have a remarkable versatility. Did the Cardrona bridge wash away? Be sure Chas Templeton aided by his equally dour striker, Gordon McEwan, would be seen laying the new planks. Was a new house needed? Chas would be seen felling a tree somewhere and later guiding the logs through a mill powered by some ancient engine. When the never-ending carrying of buckets of water from the river became too much, it was Chas who built a pump.

  I often wondered if somewhere there was a cookbook in which was listed:

  "(P). Pumps, water, for large rivers.

  Material required:

  Four railway lines (old); two diesel drums, four disc plough coulter, one old chaff-cutter wheel, four large planks, pump plunger and cylinder, four bevel gears, some discarded shafting, 60 feet of chain, two fencing winches, cement, four large grease cups, stray bolts and nuts.

  Method.

  Place drums beside river in winter at low water, place 2 railway lines vertical and fill with concrete made by blacksmith's assistant on beach. Bolt on horizontal bar. Build sliding wood frame on remaining two lines. Heat plough coulters in forge and hammer into shape for propellor..." and so on .

  That pump worked all through every summer and intermittently in the winter for I suppose, thirty years. Only in the spring floods did it fail when the current became too sluggish to turn the four foot diameter propellor. Broken ploughs, discs, harrows, dray parts, allowed only two remedies in the absence of electric welding, they could be fire welded or "acetone" welded. The latter was of course, oxyacetylene, the acetylene being stored by being dissolved under pressure in acetone. In effect brass was melted over the break, fire welding was better.

  I would arrive at the forge with some broken piece of iron, the forge would be flaming and some piece of metal would already be glowing straw yellow. At the right moment Chas would pick up a pair of tongs, pull out the metal, nod and place it on the anvil with some shaped dolly laid on top. McEwan would immediately begin to strike with an Bib or 12Ib hammer, quick solid blows to begin with, slower with more power as the iron dulled to red. Clang! Clang! Clang! Then back it went into the forge. A couple of pumps on the handle of the bellows, tipped with a cow-horn. Then he would condescend to notice me.

  "What do ye want ?" he would rumble. I would show the broken metal.

  "Lay it there!" Finally our broken plough share would go into the fire, more pumps on the bellows, glowing yellow it would be hammered out, the two pieces lapped glowing hot and hammered together. I have seen Norse axes made by exactly the same method but they were a thousand years old. Finally it would be hardened by plunging into water or oil or some other witches brew. When tractors began to appear about 1930, there were no mechanics and only one solution to a break-down.

  "We had best tow her and let Charley Templeton have a look." And seldom was Chas at a loss. He was also a renowned sportsman with rod and gun and kept a shooting lodge up the Hunter Valley at the head of Lake Hawea. The oldest son Dave, was about my age, and I envied his tales of adventures "up the Hunter", rather like our own "up Aspiring". Once I saw Chas standing in an odd round-shouldered stance, double-barrelled gun in hand, by a patch of scrub.

  "Seek 'em out, seek 'em out!" he kept saying to the dog. A rabbit would bolt, the barrels would swing, Siami and the rabbit would crumple. Then another. I don't think Chas ever glanced to see whether he had scored a hit, he knew! With all his trophy stag heads, and twenty-pound record rainbow, I never saw him smile, he never spoke two words where one would suffice, a hard man to know I think. Once, an unfortunate young woman, perhaps one of our school teachers, was staying with the Templetons. She emerged from the bathroom dressed to go visiting with her nails painted and Chas spoke an unusually long sentence.

  "You can go back to the bathroom and take that damned stuff off!" he rumbled. "A body'd think you bin guttin' rabbits !" Shaken, the poor girl went, one did not argue with Chas.

  The Morris family had their farm about two miles away but Mrs Morris was unusually kind and helpful to our family when we first arrived, and my second name, "Maurice” is an adaptation of "Morris". They were a large family and as children tend to accept people without question, just who was related in what way to whom has always been beyond me. There was Dave, Ernie, Lin, and Kate, and Mrs Templeton, though much older, was also a Morris. Dave farmed wheat for a time at Mount Barker, Ernie for a time drove our school bus and then the Railway Roadservices bus to Dunedin, (thus competing with their own railway). When old Grandfather Morris passed on, Lin took over the farm, having been educated at the Agricultural College. After the war he would often call up and invite me to help with the ploughing, or the hay or harvesting. By about 1947 they had a farmall tractor which burned power kerosene, and we were picking up hay bales. It seemed to have two speeds, flat-out or stop but Lin, like many of that generation, did not have much mechanical knowledge. When I was in Rotorua with the Forestry immediately after the war, I met a girl who was an only daughter and her father yearned for someone to pass on his considerable mechanical skill to and I was elected, often spending a Saturday working on some expensive Buick, too good a car to be entrusted to an average mechanic.

  A peer at the governor of the tractor confirmed that something had come loose and five minute's work had a perfectly controllable tractor going again. Lin was more impressed than he should have been and not only gave me more things to fix, but sang my praises to others. How was I to know how useful this was later to be in keeping farm Fergusons going at 40 below in Antarctica.

  Later, people made remarks about, "How could you just build and then take off in a yacht and sail from Canada back to New Zealand?” and all I could reply was, "When you are born on a farm, you learn to do most things!"

• Chapter 12 - The Big City

  We did not stay entirely locked in our mountain fastness, once every two or three years most people ventured out into the outside world, usually to the city of Dunedin, two hundred miles away on the coast, though there [were] many who in their whole lives had probably never been beyond Cromwell. In about 1929 we visited relatives of the Morris family at Studholme Junction, near Oamaru, though how we made the journey I cannot imagine, probably by car, bumping our way over the Lindis Pass, those being the days, when if another car was seen, one would certainly stop for a chat and on steep pitches the men might get out and push!

  I have the clearest memory of, at the age of three, standing clinging to a netting fence as a great steam train thundered by on the branch lines which was meant to extend inland towards Omarama, now closed. Then in 1932 we went to Dunedin for the World Scout Jamboree an e met Lord Baden-Powell. We went by train and stayed with one of our summer campers, a Mr Parkinson who lived at Broad Bay. He drove a car and had a garage that projected over Ota go Harbour.

  Bands of scouts from all over the world (my elder brother being a Scout) competed putting up tents, and building structures out of manuka poles. I had never seen so terrifyingly many people. Father sat me on the grass in front of the crowd listening to a Brass Band. There was a spare seat by the bandsmen and I toddled out and sat on it, they not seeming to mind . I heard a ripple of laughter from the crowd but did not associate it with myself.

  Later I set out to search for the rest of the family and got thoroughly lost, not lost in a direction sense because any country-bred child has an inbuilt sense of direction, but so many people thronging about was totally confusing. I followed a small group out through a wicket gate in the Carisbrook grounds and found myself on sets of shining steel rails. This was wrong so I headed back and luckily was found!

  In the late twenties a Motor Coach ran from Pembroke to Cromwell and one evil day after it had crossed the river by the punt, the bank gave way as it mounted the river terrace and it rolled almost into the river. It was painted bright red and yellow and had brass door handles and the plate-glass windows were broken. Finally a steam traction engine hauled it up the bank, the most exciting event for years. The traction engine was left with fires banked on top of the terrace and that night I was sent to get the mail at the roadside, and, hurricane light in hand, I had to walk past the glowing monster. It chose that moment to blow off some steam and had it exploded I could hardly have had a greater fright. There seemed something intrinsically evil about a machine that could make up its own mind to do a thing like that!

  In the mid-thirties Don McLeod ran his bus-truck every morning the 37 miles to Cromwell but via Hawea and connected with the train. One could only holiday in the late autumn or winter when there was not so much farm work, so that to journey to Dunedin 187 miles away meant waiting for Don and standing on the roadside on the frozen ground and dark at 7:30am, with the fog rising eerily from the river. The truck would suddenly appear out of the fog, usually running late and we would bundle aboard. Every house and farm gate would be stopped at, cream-cans, letters and parcels picked up, and people would give our driver odd commissions.

  "Would you drop this battery off at the garage to be charged, Don?"

  "Could you pick up some things I've ordered from Jollies, Don?"

  "Would you put this on the train, Don?"

  Once past Hawea Flat, the houses thinned out a bit and we would make better time, but with more stops at Luggate and Queensberry, then rattling on across the well-named Gravelly Gully, a stop at Lowburn, then Don, getting anxious and looking at his watch would say, "I must try the shortcut!" and rattle over the bumps of a worse-than-usual road direct to Cromwell instead of the longer route by the hospital, then straight over the bridge and the foaming "Boiling Pot" to the railway station. We, of course, were never late, no train-driver would move until Don's red truck was seen to arrive. Then a climb up through the wrought-iron gates into the cold carriages with their hard red-leather seats and the bustle of the other passengers.

  After an unbearable delay and the anxiety of Mother vanishing on some mysterious errand to 'buy tickets', there would come the whistle of the guard and the brazen hoot from the locomotive that echoed back and forth across the gorge, and amazingly the whole immense train would jolt and grind and begin to move. Slowly it would wind down the Cromwell gorge, the grey-layered rocks seldom enlivened by anything greener than a thistle except for the occasional apricot orchard. Below, the turbulent river showed blue on our side with the other half yellow from the waters of the Kawarau. After an hour we would emerge from the gorge and its echoes, the sun would be burning off the frost and the steam pipes would have warmed the chill in the carriage and one could even take off an overcoat.

  At Alex we would leave the Clutha Valley and wind up the Manuherekia and climb over the Raggedy Range, panting hard and hooting frequently. On an S bend it was claimed you could jump down, run up the hill and step aboard again. Blocky schist tors dotted the barren country and rabbits hopped about and we would stop at little stations like Oturehua and Ida Valley with little to be seen but a two-room station, perhaps a store and two or three houses, a few faded red-painted railway trucks and wagons used as mobile caravans by railway workers. Eventually we would emerge onto the Maniatoto plains and the train would gather up its skirts and pant along at about forty miles an hour, positive flying, until, past Wedderburn, Ranfurly would be reached for a leisurely lunch stop.

  At the hotel, on starched table cloths and heavy silver would come the highly predictable lunch of Scotch Broth, Roast Mutton or Beef, followed by (a) Rice pudding, (b) Custard, (c) Fruit Salad or (d) Ice Cream. The menu was the same in any hotel from Riverton to Riverhead which gave dining out a certain charm of simplicity compared to modern times when one may be offered souvlaki or couscous or a smorgasbord! The carriage by this time would be getting gritty from cinders, but the train would chuff on past Rock and Pillar and Middlemarch with the blocky tors standing on the skyline like Stone Age monoliths or menhirs, and the fields becoming markedly greener than those up-country. Then the line plunges into the Manuka Gorge, winding down the yellow Taieri river, the whistle blasting at tunnel after tunnel, rock bluffs flashing by only feet away, with dense stands of manuka between, and the yellow river below. Then a stop at Hindon, deep in the gorge for afternoon tea in the classic thick heavy Railway cups , and on, finally to suddenly hurtle out of the gorge onto the emerald-green Taieri plain. Mosgiel, Green Island, and Abbotsford followed and then the long dark Caversham tunnel before emerging into a different world with on every hand red-roofed brick houses by the thousand. Down the Glen to Caversham, then a sweep past the Engine sheds with dozens of locomotives steaming quietly on the shunting yards or even a train rattling by on another track until at 5:30 in the evening, sliding quietly into the ancient smoke-blackened station, its black stone so reminiscent in style of Edinburgh Castle.

  To go to Edin Burgh from Dun Edin is confusing, in Edinburgh Princes Street and George Street are parallel, in Dunedin, continuous. In Edinburgh one come from the north through Queensferry and Waverley and Corstorphine, in Dunedin one comes from the south and if one passes through Corstorphine, Waverley is far away. High Street diverges from near the statue to Sir Walter Scott, but in Dunedin the next street is Rattray but not in the other, Rattray being a village out by Stirling Castle. The railway stations are relatively in similar places but where is Dunedin Castle? Not down Castle Street!

  At 5:30 at night the plaza outside the railway station would be thronging with trams, bicycles, and thousands of people hurrying to catch trains to the suburbs. Laden with luggage we fought our way into a great clanging tram, showering sparks overhead for the short trip to the Exchange, to alight and face the total confusion of dozens of trams with name boards with romantic names like St. Kilda, Andersons Bay, St. Clair, Opoho, while across the street came the curious rumbling of the cable cars jerking off to climb the mountainside to Highgate, Roslyn and Corstorphine. Suddenly Mother would say; "This is ours," and we would scramble aboard another clanging monster with the name "Caversham" lit up in front. Everywhere there were lights, street lights, shop lights, headlights, fizzing signs in red, green or yellow over the shops, not kerosene or gas lights but harsh, glaring lights run by what people called "Electricity". It was all very odd, in the houses one only had to push down a catch on a wall and a bright light would leap into being.

  After bumping and grinding along for a mile or two the crowd would thin and one might even get a slatted seat. Mother would scan the street names anxiously, for all she had lived for years in London, a city even bigger than Dunedin, after years of quiet country existence she found visits to the city trying.

  "This is it, quick now!" and we would stumble down and walk a few blocks up to the Manse where the Sullivan family lived, old friends who once lived in Pembroke where Mr Charles Sullivan had been Presbyterian Minister. Soon, kindly Mrs Sullivan would be beaming a welcome and I would shake hands with Andrew of my own age and his younger sister Margaret who later came to such a tragic end on Copeland Pass. It was hard to sleep in the City, noises went on all night, trains panting up The Glen, and tooting at the tunnel, and even before daylight, the clop of hooves on cobbles as the milk drays made the rounds. Sometimes I would go out, it was reassuring to see a horse again in such a mad world. The air smelled of sulphur and coal smoke and always seemed damp.

  Dunedin meant shopping, rather tedious hours for me following Mother through the D.I.C., perhaps greeting Mr Herne who drove one of the neat fleet of D.I.C. Austin vans which called annually to take our clothing orders for the year. Then Arthur Barnets with its curious electrical replica of a horse galloping above the building. It still gallops, 65 years later.

  Best of all were the Milk Bars where one could drink a whole pint of whipped-up milk flavoured with all kinds of exotic flavours, only people did not drink but sucked it through a straw! Apart from shopping there seemed to be remarkably little one could do. Andrew had a go-kart and we could rattle down the steep streets of Caversham, but the lack of space quickly became oppressive. Andrew did not possess a rifle nor did there seem to be much to shoot. The Sullivans had a "Crib" at Ocean Beach and we would all go there for a few days, but the sand was usually cold and nights were disturbed by the unfamiliar crash of the surf. Once we assayed a swim at St Clair, the water was biting cold and I was knocked off my feet in the surf to find, not the clear sweet water of the Clutha, but bitter salt! I hated it cordially. The seaweeds were interesting and the rock pools and I would sit up on the dunes looking over the far horizon and wonder where the other side might be.

  Dr Carswell who camped every summer in the poplar trees by the river, for the trout fishing, always took us for a drive in his Austin car, through bush drives, or down the peninsular. Dr Carswell was a gentleman of the old school, and his son Bill was at Medical School (and later a surgeon with the 2nd N.Z. Div.), and his charming daughter Eleanor who played tennis and was also at University, a kind of high school for grownups in a building like a Norman Castle down (appropriately) Castle Street. Sadly I have not seen Eleanor in many years, during the war she twice became engaged to young Army officers, both of whom were killed at the front. Dr Carswell had a fund of stories, about old Sew Hoy and other Chinese miners up the Arrow, and of Scots jokes which he told in broad dialect. One was about a Scottish salmon poacher who was intrigued to read of poaching of rhinoceros in Africa, how could one possibly stuff a "Rhinocerios down one's breeks?" It concluded:

  "It isna use, I'm na content,
  Wi' hope I'm fair delirious,
  I maun be awa, to Africa,
  To poach a rhinocerious!"

  We visited Museums and Art Galleries, Cargill's Castle and Larnach’s Castle and Dr Carswell would relate tales of the choleric Captain Cargill who would drive his coach furiously through a crowd, flogging the people aside with a coach whip! Then one day a long ride in a cable car to Kaikourai Valley to visit Arthur Ellis & Co and be shown through the factory by Mr E followed by a visit to his home up the hill where he could talk to Mount Aspiring with the help of a complicated box of wires and valves. After fifteen minutes of "This is 4DQ calling 4DR, how do you read, Jack?" there would come the distorted but recognisable voice of Mr A. Once Mr E handed me the microphone and I poured out an avalanche of questions, "Hello, Mr A, how is Mary, did Peggy have a foal, have you shot any deer - ?” until Mr E laughing, said, "Whoa, whoa, let him answer!"

  Different though it all was, we were not sad to begin the long journey home, to see familiar mountains again, and notice how the snow had come down the hills and the river gone down. Then a long walk round the familiar places, rifle on shoulder, pat the cows, and perhaps throw a saddle on a horse for a quick canter, smell the clean dry air, it was always nice to be home!

• Chapter 13 - Of Mountains & Things

  Many people in the western world are preoccupied with sport, or physical activity undertaken for the sheer physical enjoyment of it, (to say nothing of the money, publicity, ego-building, notoriety and other aspects), and a great deal of sport is concerned with beating the daylights out of various kinds of balls. People now probably expend a great deal more energy throwing, carrying, kicking, slapping, poking and hitting with clubs, or bats , balls of various sizes and shapes than they ever do in earning a living! As Dr Barry Jackson once said, my dislike of all these activities probably means I have no coordination of hand and eye!

  At school in the 1930's we played cricket using rusted kerosene tins as wickets (the sonorous "bong!" they gave when struck simplified umpiring), and the pitch was dished by wear which simplified bowling. Only once did I ever star at cricket, in a competition game with another school at Maungawera. It must have been a seven-a-side match as I doubt either school could have mustered an eleven, and, as it sometimes does, everything fell into place and I knocked the ball in every direction scoring rather more than half the total runs and an easy victory! But normally, cricket or football seemed to me rather mindless activities, perhaps basketball less so.

  My daughter is a Rhythmic Gymnast and goes to World Games, her husband is a University Blue but I remain a universal duffer. Once I helped a friend train for Varsity sculls in a racing shell, but like swimming, rowing is so totally mindless, let concentration stray for a moment and you catch a crab and the loom of the sweep catches you in the belt region and over you go! Cards bore me intensely, while perhaps only Canadian hockey or gymnastics hold some interest as a spectator sport. I can spend a long time at sea, once I went for three years without a night on shore and sixteen hours on the wheel with a gale behind is not an uncommon experience, yet though making a fast passage across the Pacific pleases me, I really have little comprehension of the mentality of the yacht racer. There is a vast satisfaction in coaxing a sailing vessel across the ocean, working to windward, getting a thing of wood and canvas to move where you will, though perhaps it is scarcely a sport. In the same way flying aeroplanes demands skill without competition, and though one might liken gliding to sailing, somehow, the thought of facing a mountain with no way of getting over it other than by finding a perhaps non existent up-draft is not appealing though I do not hesitate to sail without a motor.

  Hill-walking is totally uncompetitive, but like sailing, there is a pleasure in doing something well, in being surefooted, in being able to find a sure route where a bull Tahr might pause! Once we were crossing a particularly nasty scree slope, the kind that most people slip and slide on and send hundreds of rock fragments clattering down the mountain-side. Sir Edmund H-[ilary] was in the party, and Sir J. Holmes M-, two Hermitage guides and, I think Richard Brooke. Suddenly I became aware of the awful silence, five large men were crossing the slope ahead quickly and precisely, placing their feet with such assurance that not a stone fell. On another occasion coming down steep rock with few footholds more than an inch wide, one could only shake one's head ruefully at the cat-like grace and agility of the great bulky guide, Mick Bowie, who must have weighed seventeen stone. Even walking for the sake of walking has little attraction for me personally (like Con Scott, I have to battle to live strenuously), yet given an unknown valley ahead, or the brown hills of the Langtang Himal glimpsed through a distant pass, I can walk the hills for months on end. Before the rubber Vibram boot soles came in, I used to buy a new pair of Frame's boots every year, drive in 74 iron clinkers and a dozen or two triple hobs, and by the end of the summer, they would be worn out. For about thirty years, except those when I was in some other country, I would make an annual pilgrimage to the Aspiring area or to the Hermitage or both. Up beyond Cascade at Aspiring there were seldom other people and one could often go alone, camping out or in the high huts or under one of the many rock bivouacs.

  My first mountain was Mount French and leaving the rifle in the French Ridge Bivvy hut under the watchful eye of the keas, I climbed on up towards the snow and ice. I had no ice-axe but there was a long-handled shovel in the hut and hadn't Arawhata Bill climbed with a shovel? A chop inwards and one down in the frozen snow and one gets an excellent step. A layered snow-cliff overhanging Gloomy Gorge suggested that perhaps the edge should not be approached too closely. Near the summit cloud came down so I slept for a bit in a wind-scoop in the snow and suddenly it cleared showing briefly the pyramid of Aspiring across the Bonar. Coming down towards the Quarter Deck a foot went deep in the snow, was it a crevasse? There were open, blue-lipped crevasses about, but surely one wide enough to swallow me would show on the surface. Or would it? I tucked the shovel handle firmly under an armpit.

  The alps, basins or shoulders above the bushline have a certain fascination, one is above the valley and above the ordinary, the gentians, ranunculus’ and celmisia’s peep from under snow patches, burns leaps down the mountainside in a series of cascades, the deer wander about, a patch of cloud hiding a summit flirts back to reveal pristine snow, distant unknown mountains appear framed by pass and col. Once three of us toiled up the three thousand odd feet to French Ridge hut, we left the birchwood behind, then the alpine totara and the dracophyllum gardens, crossed the greenschist belt, saw the first yellow ranunculus sericophyllus. Surely there should be deer, ah yes, run an eye round the trails on the other side of Gloomy Gorge, three, five, six, eight hinds and spikies. There should be a stag or two, oh, there he is, a few hundred feet above, his antlers on the skyline, almost hidden by the rock and dracophyllum latifolium. Keas, the mountain parrots, planed down to land nearby for a closer inspection. One of my companions threw down his swag in disgust.

  "Isn't this a boring grind?" he complained. "Nothing to see, not even a deer! What are you laughing at?" City-bred people, "asphalters" as old Donald Sutherland called them, have eyes trained to focus a few feet away, only a country boy has eyes that see!

  One of my favourite alps lies on the high-level route from Four Brother’s Pass into the Forgotten. The snow-grass is waist high and there are still deer trails winding amid rocks. High up is a large dark tarn below the snow from which a burn cascades down towards the Olivine, and one can rest on a carpet of alpine flowers.

  I eventually climbed a few mountains in various countries, not many, a hundred and fifty perhaps, perhaps a couple hundred, but about fifty or more of these had never before felt a man's boot which made it rather more satisfying, any fool can tread in another man's footsteps. It is popular for the gutter press to talk of "conquering mountains", but the poor mountain has been there a million years, even five million years ago it might well have been still recognisable. Condors, keas or animals may reach even very high summits, one day Peter McCormack and I walked down from Westhoe Pass over Roon, Von Bulow, Moltke etc before dropping down to the Franz Josef and on the highest snow summits we found sign of the chamois. One day a panting man toils upwards, if he is lucky, the snow is just right, there is no verglas on the rocks, the snow shower dropped by a towering cumulus passes by, and perhaps for a few minutes he pants on the top, drinks from a plastic bottle, eats a few raisins, stares in misgiving at an approaching nimbus, pats the mountain on its bald head, perhaps places three little stones as a memorial cairn, and departs. What has he conquered? An hour later sleet drives over the summit, he would have died had he remained.

  Once we reached the Low Peak at the beginning of a Grand Traverse of Cook at eight a.m. on a fine clear morning. Before we were half way to the Middle, puffs of cloud were appearing from nowhere and sweeping up the West Face, a freezing wind began to whine.

  "Back, I think!" said Colin Todd, and I agreed. We fought our way down the summit rocks, now glazed in ice as were the shafts of our ice-axes, with granular snow pouring down, scraping with gloves to find a handhold, poking with an ice-axe ferrule for a foothold, ice building up on anoraks, sweeping snow giving a visibility of a few feet. Three hours up from Gardiner, four hours down. Now if we had gained the High Peak on that day, we would have really conquered something!

  "Saw you on the Low Peak, this morning," said old Mick Bowie, the Chief Hermitage guide. "Thought I'd see you back this afternoon!" and he smiled the complacent smile of a man who knows his mountains and his men.

  On the way down from Gardiner we had passed two Australian climbers, making slow time and under-equipped. Next day, Bowie approached again, wearing his usual old gaberdine cap and tweed knickbockers and a rather concerned expression.

  "Bernie," rumbled he, "you saw those two on the Hooker yesterday, did you think they knew what they were doing?"

  "No!" said I, briefly. They had identified themselves as ministers of some obscure sect and claimed they were going to camp or snow-cave for a week. Their packs were unreasonably light and one of my companions, Dr Fred Hollows hefted one of their packs in scepticism.

  "I would say you are going to be either bloody cold or bloody hungry," he had commented derisively.

  "Think I'll send Hap and Bos up to look!" said Bowie. "They haven't reported in." They were found trapped on the ledges of Pudding Rock by the ice from the sleet we had come through, unable to move up or down. Luckily they had roped themselves to the rock. Even the very ankles of a mountain can be a hazard.

  Once we climbed Aspiring on a calm summer day up the gentle North-West Ridge, a mere stroll. Another year , another day, another ridge. Early in the season we expected the South-West Ridge to be snow but it was ice. It took an hour to kick up the Summit Couloir, an hour to cut in hard ice across to the top of the North-West ridge. It was six p.m. before we reached the summit but it was one of those perfect evenings, still, but with files of towering cumulus marching up the Waiototo, just as they march up the Dudh Kosi towards Everest when the Monsoon season is approaching. For a whole hour we sat entranced by the view, from Tutoko in the south to the wedge of Cook to the north, from the blue Tasman almost to the Pacific, with Big Red Hill and the Olivines glowing in the setting sun. Then we ran down, down the easy ridge, but the Bonar had softened and the snow was knee-deep and it was midnight before we fell into the bivouac to drink pints of jello, fruit juice, tea, any liquid at all.

  Slowly I came to appreciate rock scrambles, there is a certain balance and feel for rock which is not acquired in a day but there comes a time when one can slap a hand on a rock knowing the fingers will, of their own accord find a hold. The firm crystalline Darrans are the finest, every bit as good as the best Cuillins on Skye, though once, on the Homer Saddle-Bell ridge with an inexperienced party, I turned back. The snow-smoothed rock was steep and one had to rely on friction only.

  Your modern climber of course, hammers in steel, drills bolt holes, hooks on etriers, winches himself up using jumars and then claims he has climbed the unclimbable, he has not of course, merely destroyed one of its defences. Rarely on one day one may have both an ice and a rock climb. The East Face of Malte Brun, one of our seventeen Ten-Thousanders, was still unclimbed in the early fifties. The approach up the Murchison valley is long and hard, with massive sliding moraines, a boulder-strewn valley floor, a wild, tossing river that seems to leap high above its banks so that the most diminutive member of the party, Miss Gillian Soper, who stands a bare five feet in her climbing boots had to battle over clinging to a rope and buried in spray. Spring snow cascaded off the mountain flanks, and a preliminary climb of a virgin ridge of Hamilton found us descending at midday and setting off a thousand tons of wet snow with every step, a packed snowball tossed down on a side slope would set off several thousand tons crashing and booming over the bluffs onto a tributary of the Murchison Glacier.

  The East Face of Malte Brun itself proved to be three thousand feet of ice and hard snow to be kicked and cut. A hint of a ridge suggested a slightly easier course, and I painfully hacked out steps two feet deep out of green ice. I do not, on principle, approve of crampons, but to stay in an ice step without them requires a perfect step, inclined slightly inwards and a degree of craftsmanship that I don't think, at that time I possessed. The last thousand feet was soft enough to kick "pigeon holes " in, front-point crampons not being invented then. The oddity about Malte Brun is that the Tasman side, which faces the sun, is almost bare rock, compared to the Murchison Face which is ice. We kicked down a short snow pitch towards the West Ridge, the same patch where Happy Ashurst had only weeks before had quite a fright.

  "I was cutting some steps down," said Hap, later, "and the client must have decided to move. He didn't make a sound as he fell , but I heard a scrape on the snow behind and banged in the axe, and Wham! the rope took up when fifty feet had run out!"

  Below the snow patch is the bright red greywacke of Malte Brun and Arguille Rouge, seamed and cracked, but usually solid. Mick Bowie sent Marcel Kurz up Malte Brun for a rock climb.

  "A good rock climb?" asked Mick on his return.

  "Ha!" said Kurz, "You mean a good climb over rocks!" Rank slander, there are loose bits but it has a perfect gritty surface so that one never feels that the friction might run out, always enormously more pleasurable that the rubble that lies on the lower part of the Matterhorn however famous it might be, and it has none of the greasy treachery of the Eigerwand. Half way down is the gable-like Cheval Ridge on Malte Brun, where, if one’s balance is good, one walks, ice-axe under arm, or if one is Samuel Turner, poses balancing ice-axe on chin, if not one hops along astride as though on a horse. Three thousand feet down one has to leave the ridge and descend right down a slab face to the Malte Brun Glacier, or get trapped on a bluff, but where? I watched the nail scratches of clinkered boots, Mick Bowie alone had guided about forty parties up the Cheval Ridge. Suddenly the scratches ended, but they could be seen in toeholds on the slab to the right. A classic descent, body away from the rock, face out, hands low, as though down a ladder. Below the ice a snow couloir promised a quick descent almost to the old Malte Brun Hut, hard-packed snow with a surface slick, a perfect standing glissade, one can ski down as though on boots, even doing "parallel" turns. I made a classic stop turn in a spray of snow, a safe ten feet from the edge of the snow, but there was a crunch and a roar, the massive snow, under-melted by the sun broke off and it and I fell a dozen feet onto jagged rocks. To this day I try to get an aisle seat in Jumbo Jets to keep that knee out straight if possible!

  At any moment a mountain may strike back. One Easter we were enjoying a day on the rock in the Darrans near Homer when we noticed a party on the glacier between Gertrude Saddle and Crosscut standing stationary for a long time. Finally it became obvious, "They must have had an accident!" We made a long traverse along a summit ridge for a mile or more, up and down over towers and tor, shinning up cracks, leaping from rock to rock, jumping great chasms in the ridge that gaped below. It was after dark when we reached the party to find that one had snagged a crampon and broken a leg while attempting to do a sitting glissade. We splinted the leg and carried him down to a sheltered spot on Gertrude Saddle for the night and brought a stretcher up next day.

  Other times we were not so lucky. In 1954 I was shaken awake at the Fox at about 3am to find Mick Sullivan looking unusually tense at the bedside.

  "Wrong room, Mick!" I muttered, "she's next door!" He didn't even smile.

  "I have just had a phone call from a very worried wife," he said . "They are five days overdue, you had better go and take a look. Do you want someone with you? How about Trevor Carleton?" Trevor was an ex-deerculler, and at that time I was giving him a hand in my spare time building a washhouse for the Fox Hotel, (It still stands, to my lasting pride!). The next day, Trevor Carleton and I walked forty miles up the Copeland and back, looking for the three missing climbers, Foster, Moss and MacKay, finding only a depot of food. It was a salutary lesson in just how fit a professional hillman may be, Carleton simply never bothered to stop for a rest in the entire twelve hours, padding along bush tracks, loping over boulder-strewn beds of mountain burns, trotting over wire bridges, pressing on through fern. Back at the truck, by the Cook River, Carleton espied the car of the missing climbers, perhaps ten chain away.

  "I'll just take a look," he said, and ran, yes, ran over to it! The next day we found the tent with billies of mouldering stew on the ridge above Scotts Creek, and Peter MacCormack and I followed their presumed route to within a few feet of the summit of Sefton without finding any further sign. No trace was ever found. A crevasse bridge gives way, a cornice breaks off, a rock falls and, if your luck has run out, you are gone.

  Once on an easy mountain in the Central Andes within sight of the great Aconcagua a careless Chilean dislodged a rock directly above, and the result could be used as a classic illustration for the need to wear hard hats!

  Most men have unexpected strengths and weaknesses. Roy Beedham was an English quarryman and a tower of strength on rock. It was nearly dusk when we reached the lip of the ice on the Birley glacier below Earnslaw on the way to Esquilant Bivvy after a long traverse from the Earnslaw Burn. Suddenly I was aware that Beedham's confidence had completely gone and he was positively clinging to the ice. Only months before his partner had fallen on Graham Saddle on similar ice and almost dragged him to his death, another partner had fallen on Green Peak, into a crevasse when a rope slipped over an ice bollard.

  "Please," he said, "I think you better cut!" He flatly refused to put on a rope – “The last time I put on a rope he fell and nearly killed me as well!" – and I cut a long line of steps – soon a candle flickered into being in the cramped little Esquilant Hut to show the signs of strain in a haggard face. The following summer, Beedham was gone, beneath an avalanche in the Linda, graveyard of the mountaineer.

  How well I remember Bert Esqillant for whom the hut is named. He had been a navigator in a Hudson in the Solomon Islands, and one summer in 1944 we were entertaining Bob Craigie and a friend, just back from the Artillery in Italy, when Mr E rang from Dunedin to say that Esquilant has just arrived back in NZ and wished to join them. The Otago Section of the Alpine Club had an ancient car and he finally arrived in it at 10 p.m. Apparently the radiator boiled and Bert refilled it with a cup from a distant creek.

  His face was yellow from atabrine and Mother, in concerned fashion plied him with fresh food and fruit. He was embarrassed to find he had eaten a whole bowl of nectarines, "I'm so sorry, I just haven’t seen fruit in a year!"

  "Have some more!" said Mother. Only a year or two later Esquilant died in a climbing accident in the Swiss Alps.

  There are really only one group of mountains in the U.S. of A. worthy of the name, the Grand Tetons south of Yellowstone Park. I climbed the Grand from Garnet Canyon with three very amateur climbers from Virginia Polytech. The rock is a kind of knobbly granite, lovely stuff, but my companions made heavy weather of it, and could not see a route unless it was painted bright yellow! We descended down the west face and one comes to an overhang where tattered remnants of rope showed the location of a classic rappel of more than a hundred feet. We had to tie both ropes together which meant they could not be protected by a second rope.

  "Are you sure you can do it?” asked I, anxiously.

  "No trouble at all!" said one, and nonchalantly kicked off in a free fall, the nylon screaming through the carabiner. The others followed with equal speed, I with more caution and on feet reaching Terra Firma, demanded an explanation. It appeared that back at college was a single rock bluff which in any spare moment they walked up taking a climbing rope and rappelled down. They never learnt to climb, but rappel they surely could!

  A mountain has many defences, the approaches may wear one down as Green and Boss found as they forded the Tasman river on their way to Cook. Being landed by helicopter a few thousand feet from the summit has removed two-thirds of the effort, perhaps if latter-day mountaineers had any regard for their hills, all air-lifts would be forbidden. It is well said that a climb of Cook should start at Unwin Hut.

  Once we reached the corrie at the head of the Diorite Burn, on the way over Four Brothers Pass and the high route into the Forgotten and the Olivine Ice Plateau, remote and beautiful country. As we sat over a smudge of fire, there came a hellish racket and a helicopter clattered over, a shooter sitting in the door with an automatic rifle, on an illegal scout for deer.

  At Darwin Corner on the Tasman, where on every hand alabaster ice drapes the hillsides in frozen cascades, the snow underfoot may be lined with plastic film and food wrappers from tourists landed by ski-plane. On the Testa Grigia between the Matterhorn and the Breithorn, the immaculate snow more resembles a city garbage dump as Italian tourists pour from the Teleferic rising from Alagna. At least in Antarctica one is not likely to find signs of man, at least out of fifty odd peaks we climbed we found a sardine tin on the top of one up the Ferrar Glacier with a note from Fio Ugolini and Professor Dezio of Rome, but we forgave him, one is not many. Dezio had led the Italian attempt on K2.

  In the old days, Richard Brooke and I planned to ski up onto Aylmer at the head of the Tasman Glacier and Harry Wigley who had just invented retractable skis for his Auster plane took me aside.

  "I hear you will be up the Glacier tomorrow, Bernie," said he. "I promised to drop the two children off near Darwin corner so they can ski down to Ball, will you keep an eye out for them?"

  We had a glorious run down from Aylmer, the snow was perfect, one drifted down hill until the speed of wind flying past became positively frightening, then drifted over towards Darwin, then a long slow curve back towards Hochstetter Dom, a quick flirt round some crevasses, a few quick "hup and arounds" on a steeper pitch and then on! Miles below I saw the little Auster land and two dots depart down valley and soon we were flashing on their trail. I stared! There was suddenly only a single set of tracks! Then the two tracks diverged until they were six feet apart and then came together. We caught up on the two children who were laughing hysterically.

  "Did you like our tracks?" gurgled Miss Sally Wigley, aged twelve. "We were skiing on one foot!"

  Only once have I not resented the intrusion of aeroplanes. Minette Ross and I were in the Matukituk at Aspiring Hut in about 1953 and Christopher Johnstone, ex Battle of Britain pilot, had promised us a beat-up. Chris was all of forty and New Zealand bureaucracy is absolutely maniacal about age, most of our best pilots had to fight to be allowed to fly, Captain Alan Ladd of "Widgeon" fame perhaps our oldest pilot, fought for a year to be allowed to fly because he was nearly thirty! At the age of seventy he had about 25,000 hours behind him and still the bureaucrats tried to take away his licence! Colin Gray was our top scoring pilot and they tried to ground him being suspicious of operation scars on his legs. Gray laughed these off as "an old football injury" but his osteomyelitis did play up again later. Then we all know of the battle Douglas Bader had on the ground, every bit as intense as the one later in the air, and he can be said to have won both. Chris had finally got back to flying Mustangs in TAF and Minette and I stood out on the grass flats as two Mustangs circled Aspiring and then dived deep into the echoing valley to flash by at four hundred miles an hour with a shattering roar at tree-top level. We waved and waved, and a gloved hand was lifted in reply. A few months later, Johnstone was dead, crashing in a Harvard in the Liverpool basin, scarce a mile from where we stood waving, while searching for four lost trampers, who were later found dead on the treacherous snow-grass slopes above descending from Cascade Saddle.

  I made a somewhat more modest descent into the Matuki in a Cessna a few days ago, and remembered Chris Johnstone.

  Jack Holloway knew the Olivines well, in the 1930's he was the first to explore them after the crossing of Barrington, the prospector. We were sitting round a fire near Blue Cliffs and some of the Varsity Students we had with us on National Forest Survey were discussing how long supplies would last if one started with an 80Ib load. Colin Todd was there, about to go into the Olivines himself, about two weeks he thought. Holloway often sat silent looking at the fire, as he was deaf from a bomb explosion in the war, but suddenly he looked up, the firelight playing on his yellow hair and fine intellectual features.

  "Bloody nonsense!" said he, abruptly. "You take your pack and divide it in four, in one section you put flour, in one rice and the other oatmeal. In the last you put sugar, tea and salt and matches, on top you tie a side of bacon and a sleeping bag, if you want a sleeping bag! Then you are set for two months!"

  A different world to the One-Hour’s-Flight-From-The-Hotel school!

  One of the problems in New Zealand is that we can seldom live off the land. Later, in 1947 also with Holloway, we went further towards Fiordland to put a cage over the Wairaurahiri River. We floated supplies ashore at Port Craig from a fishing boat, mainly tins of rice, flour, oatmeal, sugar and tea, as you might guess. I shot venison and occasionally pork for the camp and with twenty students, it took about a deer a day, and every day I baked a soda-bread loaf in the camp-oven. After a few week we were suffering from incredible lassitude and incipient scurvy, or so we thought, but now I rather suspect the almost fat-free diet. John Wendelken, an ex-Spitfire pilot, had a solution. He took a pole and tied a length of string or flax wrapped round a piece of venison and bobbed eels and soon Wendy had four eels on the bank. Gutted, dropped on the glowing coals, within minutes one could peel off the blackened skin and eat the tasty meat. We all perked up enormously.

  Paki Sherington, also on National Forest Survey in the Nelson area once related how his party ran out of food. "But then we came upon this thumping great eel in a pool, and I tell you boys, we had him within minutes with our slashers. We finished the whole trip on boiled eel carried in our billies!"

  Living off local food in the Himalayas often means a monotonous diet. In one area there may be little available but small potatoes, so it is mashed potatoes fried on a flat rock with ghee for breakfast and boiled potatoes for dinner. In another area it will be boiled rice twice a day, which the Sherpas and Tibetans impart some flavour to by adding red-hot chili, a bit savage for such as us. A little dhal, which is I think, pea-meal, adds to the protein, but the only salt comes from the Salinas in Tibet and is full of potassium nitrates and sulphates. In Rolwaling country, the only food was yogurt from yaks, nutritious, but one could wish for less yak-hair and other etceteras! Once, at Gorak Shep, near Everest, we passed by an old Japanese camp and there were packets of soup and noodles left lying around, and I must admit I was not too proud!

  Sledging in the Antarctic it was porridge for breakfast, chocolate for lunch and a pemmican bar for dinner, with potato powder. The pemmican bar was fifty percent fat and cooked into an evil sludge which obviously contained the stated calories as after 129 days and about 1300 miles we had lost no weight but it was not a diet to rapturise over. After three months, Richard Brooke and I might sit for several long minutes, staring at it;

  "Do you think we should?"

  "Duty calls!" Brooke would respond!

  Barrington in the Olivines, late last century was able to catch a few eels and shoot a few Mountain Ducks but mainly starved, the approaches to any mountain can form a severe testing ground. The old pre-war Everest Expeditions with the aid of yaks took a month or more to reach base camp. Dan Bryant, who once was with Shipton exploring the mountains west of Everest, was a believer in the gradual approach. We toiled up the Fox glacier in a rising storm, buffeted by blasts of snow and wind, driving in ice-axes to hold until the turmoil passed. Bryant was shouting in my ear, and finally I made out above all the shriek of the wind,

  "God, I'm enjoying this!" Later, as we sat out the storm in the rocking Pioneer Bivouac, Bryant related the story of his famous double-traverse of the Matterhorn, and how he walked up the Aletch valley from Visp to Zermatt. "One must approach the mountain gradually!" Years later, we came over the Furka Pass to Visp, and, as we took the mountain train up the valley towards Zermatt and the Matterhorn, the Breithorn, The Twins, Monte Rosa and all that ring of famous hills, I pleaded lack of time, but still felt guilty! Still, we climbed the trails up the mountainsides to Swartz Zee and the Whymper Hut, but the good Swiss and Austrians were surprised.

  "Why did you not take the teleferic?"

  Fresh snow put the Matterhorn out of condition and we backed off and instead dawdled over the Twins and the Breithorn and wondered at the hurry other climbers were in to descend. We soon found out, the teleferics cease running at 5 p.m.! So we had a totally silent and deserted mountainside to walk down all to ourselves. I searched for the old Gandegg Hut without success, perhaps it is no more. Down the green valley before one climbs again to the refuge at Swartz Zee, a yak bell tonkled in the darkness. Yak bells? Here? I must be mad! But Swiss cattle wear an identical bell to the Himalayan Yak. The Swiss are a little prosaic about their mountains, after all most of the first ascents were made by the English. Near Grindelwald, on either side of the great bluffs of the Wetterhorn are two glaciers and I asked an old guide their names.

  "Oh, ja," said he, "Das ve are calling die Uber Gletcher, unt dass ist die Untergletcher!"

  Country people at home too, are a little prosaic about the mountains. When I had just graduated from Ubiversity and set out, of course, for Aspiring with a party of climbers and we paused in Pembroke to buy food. By this time we were getting quite sophisticated and carried ice-axes and crampons and ropes, and all kinds of professional gear and I felt just a litle smug about it, as well as about my new degree. George Keep saw me, a man who was once employed by my Grandfather, and who called Father "Guv'nor" and had known me all my life.

  "What are you doing, boy?" he said. I explained. He shook his head sorrowfully.

  "When are you going to stop all this playing about, lad, and begin work?" But by 1950, our world had changed, for many of us it was no longer necessary to work 360 days of the year, from daylight to dark, and like the leisured classes of the Victorian era, we could seek out the novelties of the unknown. Like the Victorians too, we had the choice of either strenuous pleasures, or those of dissipation, and many of us preferred the toils and adversities of a life in the unknown hills.

• Chapter 14 - Relationships

  Over the millennia, men have worked out ways of controlling working relationships in which biting sarcasm, rough good humour, harsh condemnation of minor departures from acceptable behaviour, and occasional guarded praise keep other, especially younger, men on their toes and striving for group approval. There are no real close relationships between men, arms' length is quite close enough both physically and emotionally, the man you admire may be dead tomorrow, rather more than half my male friends having not lived beyond the age of thirty or thereabouts. The female of the species is not particularly useful in the male role, of the millions of artifacts and inventions which make civilisation tick, not one was invented or built by a female, but they do have the ability to be infinitely more companionable.

  I have a female friend at present who is companionable to the nth degree, we met in a somewhat odd fashion, I was bent over a fence at the farm, putting in the inevitable staple when she came walking in tired fashion up the road through the sighing pines, obviously out for a walk which had gone too far and uncertain any longer of exactly where she was. I opened the door of the Land rover;

  "You look tired," I said, "Hop in!" Without a word she did so, and two years later there is seldom a day when we do not enjoy an excursion together. Her name it seemed, was Cleo, and she had few known relatives or family ties.

  Like me she enjoys a ramble over the hills, or a stroll on the beach, she is contented during long days at sea under sail. Though she is no great helmsman, she is content to sit in the shade as I work, providing even then a sense of belonging. Driving home from the mountains in the Landrover she may sit in the back seat resting her head on my shoulder, or, sitting alongside, she is prone to demonstrative affection giving quick nuzzles which can be distracting in traffic. She has long silky hair which is always immaculate even when driving, as she prefers, with the hood down.

  On social occasions she is a good mixer and much admired as all young well-groomed females are, but I only have to catch her eye and pat the seat beside me for her to give me undivided attention. She is careless of convention, as regards being seen with me in public and at night, ignoring my protestations as well as our age difference, she curls up as close as possible.

  If I am awoken at night, I must tread carefully as there may well be a piercing shriek if I stand on her tail, but unlike her predecessor, another gorgeous young husky bitch, she does not get carried away and sink her teeth to the hilt in my ankle, Cleo, even in the wee sma' hours, is always a lady. 

• Chapter 15 - On Skiing

  The coming of the snow in winter was heralded with intense delight and not a little fear. One woke in the morning to the sound of absolutely total silence, and a glare of light on the ceiling of the old stone cottage. One leapt from bed and rushed to the narrow stone-lined window and shivered in the cold, staring at a world of unimaginable pristine purity. Gone was the mud, the vestiges of grass, the frozen ponds and lagoon, even the trees were thick-branched and white. Only the river still swung amid white banks, still green, blue and swirling. Snow on the lowlands of Strath-Clutha is coarse-flaked and melts easily, unlike the pellets of the mountains and the gritty white sand of the Polar regions.

  Finally hunger would call and the fire would be stoked up with manuka, hopefully one did not have to go to the woodshed for a fresh supply. When the pattering fall ceased, work began, the fallen snow might be a foot deep, tracks had to be dug to the woodshed, down the path to the river for water. We had no such things as anoraks to wear in the snow or any windproof for that matter, no snow-boots or stylish snow-glasses. Instead it was a tweed coat gaping at the neck and gum-boots as the snow quickly wetted ordinary boots and feet froze. Unfortunately, snow flips up and gets into gumboots too and never again from the South Pole to the North Pole, from Greenland to Tibet, have I had such cold toes! Snow or not, the cows have to be milked and we would set off, bucket in hand, dragging one of our home-made toboggans or sleds. Snow had to be shovelled out of the cow byre, but the cows, under their brown covers always seemed complacent enough. The outline of the lagoon by the cow-bails could be judged by its flatness and usually the inch or two of ice under the snow would bear up, though once it cracked and gave and in I went, through ice, snow and all. Unlike the Ross Sea, where later the same thing happened, our lagoon was only a couple of feet deep! As one milked, ducks would plane into land and potter about looking for water, unlike the times when the lagoon was surfaced in glass-like ice, when the ducks would come in for a standard landing, undercarriage down, to slide helplessly in all directions on the ice!

  Cows milked, one could start at the top of a hill and whoosh down on our sleds, though for some reason we made our sleds very short so they had little directional stability, and over we would tumble! Our experience building sleds and toboggans meant that in later life one could admire the artistry of the Nansen sled from a basis of experience!

  Once, some visitors came while the snow still lay, I think the Hunts of Maungawera, and two of them put on long wooden skis, and shot down the terrace and out onto the flat. I stared at this, the speed looked dangerous!

  After the war, a few enthusiasts began skiing in earnest and even ski-touring. People pointed in admiration to the steep slopes of the Freshfield Glacier, where ‘twas affirmed, Mick Bowie had descended from Pioneer Col to the Tasman in a series of twenty-eight linked turns! This seemed to be a feat not likely to ever repeated, yet twenty years later, so had standards changed, I would have unhesitatingly come down the same slope with our ten, twelve and fourteen-year-old children and they would have thought it great fun.

  I visited Ball Hut in the winter of '49 and a school skiing party was in residence, skiing on rope tows either on the Ball Glacier or on the moraine slopes below the hut. Never were there such joyous teenagers! Whether because of the total alpine purity of the mountains about or the wine-like air I do not know, but we sang songs while waiting for breakfast, and from dinner till late at night. No Swiss or Austrian Bergsteigers ever yodelled and carolled with such enthusiasm, the rafters rang, we danced on table-tops, flushed sun-tanned faces glowed as hands beat out the time. A group of University students who sat dourly at their table with bottles of wine seemed careworn, old and foreign by comparison. Their modern equivalents could not sing "God save the Queen!" I assayed a few gentle schusses, and climbed alone up to the head of the glacier, and received some low key warning remarks from one of the guides.

  "There are some big slots up there!" It was the first time I had heard that "In" term for an alpine crevasse! One weekend, oh, about 1953, a young medical student lady, asked me to come skiing with an Otago Ski Club group to Rock and Pillar. Such is the power and influence of such people, with great condescension, I consented. Skiers, I had noted, were people of little character, given to much socialising, often drinking and other pursuits that no Victorian Aunt would have condoned. They also talked and chattered a lot! A truck left us at the foot of R & P at midnight or thereabouts and we ploughed off uphill in knee-deep snow which became waist deep in places. Well, this was more like, in fact quite fun. The fit boys, the inevitable Alec Gourlay, the Brough Twins and associates vanished uphill at a run, but half way up I fancied I saw a face or a figure under a rock. I ploughed over and the torch lit up a shivering girl, lost, frightened and cold. A few hundred feet below the hut, which is over the crest of the range, Doug Brough came running down through the snow, having counted heads and found one missing!

  It was a perfect swine of a weekend! It snowed continuously, blew gales, and rime ice built up on every rock. There was a primitive little rope tow, but the weather was too bad to use it so we ski-walked about and slid down a little gully in the blinding murk. Inevitably, I buried a tip in a bank and twisted a knee and was quite smug about having the forethought to bring an ice-axe. By the time we had limped down the mountain I was quite hooked, this skiing had something! The next August the same young lady converted me from a totally mad projected attempt to cross from the Dart into the Joe Valley via the well-named Snowball glaciers (which would have entailed floundering to about 7000ft in neck-deep snow), into skiing for two weeks up at Ball. There were no singing, yodelling teenagers this time, but I determinedly crashed my way down hill, learning to balance at speed over bumps but not acquiring a reliable turn. We mistakenly felt we could not afford lessons and stayed down at Unwin Hut, the Alpine Club refuge, which cost me very little and Rosamund Harper, daughter of A.P. Harper, Grandfather of the Alpine Club, was warden with her two children. I did several climbs at odd times with Rosamund, and once Peter MacCormack and I brought the three of them from the Franz over to the Hermitage via Graham Saddle when the children were about 12 and 14 years of age.

  The next three or four seasons always included a couple of weeks in August at Coronet Peak in Queenstown. We began staying in a primitive little hut up the mountain called "The Pie Palace" on straw bunks with University parties, quite the most gormless people I have ever encountered. About sixteen people were supposed to bring food for at least a week, most of them turned up with a pound of sausages. It then snowed heavily for three days and not a Mount Cook bus could get up the hill. The students (mainly Medical) determinedly played Bridge on three tables at least 12 hours a day for the three days. I stoked fires, parted them from what food they had, cooked meals and when eating time came, upset the tables or they would have continued playing. Years later they reminisced over the remarkable hands that were played! There was no real conversation, but there was a young Dutch girl present and once when she was "Dummy" she related an appalling tale of deprivation in Japanese prison camps, of daily beatings, and existence on a cupful of rice a day. One of the "Meds" happened to overhear.

  "That's interesting," he remarked. "Get any avitaminosis? I'll go four No Trumps!" On the third day by dint of some blatant bullying I got three of them out to pack the ski slope! Donny MacDonald and his petite wife Lauri were the ski instructors, they came from Squaw Valley and were both neat skiers, pleasant and painstaking. Slowly (for I was in my mid-twenties, far too old to learn skiing quickly) we acquired parallel turns with body swing, jump turns, and much training in edge control so that finally we could sideslip down the entire mountain. Then up to the summit for leaps over cornices, crusty snow techniques with bouncing turns to break the crust for the 02 and T2 tests which earned one little badges and were something to strive for. The bright, clear Otago air, the distant rattle of the rope-tow, the long adventurous runs down Rocky Gully, made happy days. There were almost no tourists, people mainly belonged to the Otago or the Southland clubs and soon one would know almost every person skiing. We skied in groups of up to a dozen, striving to perfect technique, sometimes taking a run with that dour old Swiss, Joe Neiderost, who, like the first proponent of parallel skiing could not explain how he did it, but would say, "Follow me" and would flash off in lightning turns which taxed us all. Sometimes one would get in a groove, always get off at the eighth pulley, traverse away over to the right, six turns down the steep slope, a run to the edge of the next steep pitch, hup and around the moguls, and then find that somehow all ability to traverse left-handed had gone!

  By 1955 it was the Austrian instructor Carl Burcher who set a tough standard. Carl had gone home to Austria to try to make the Austrian Olympic team, but "It vas too like suicide!" In a downhill race, Burcher flashed over an icy part of the course about ten feet up in the air where already three falls and two broken legs had occurred, and I saw him whip a pole under an armpit and adjust a glove, while flying. That was the man who could not make the Austrian team!

  The real experts at that time favoured the "Lanier" binding or "Long Thong" which tied your boot down tightly and gave marvellous control, but if you fell it was your leg that went. Not that the commonly used cable bindings were much better, I lost count of the times helping down sledges with accident victims. My skis were soft spruce, not ash, and I spent hours patching the holes worn in the sole with various paints, but they were cheap, I bought them for five pounds in a second hand shop! A new type of turn was the "wedeln" which involved sitting back and making snake-like wiggles downhill by wagging the hips from side to side.

  In 1958 in Christchurch I was back from the Antarctic and the Canterbury Mountaineering Club made me an honorary member of their affiliated Craigieburn Valley Ski-Club, bless them all. It was a happy winter, the Instructor was the famous Willi Huber who later pioneered the Mount Hutt Field whom I already knew as a climber. Willi at the age of seventeen was put in the German Army and sent to fight the Russians, wounded he had a few weeks in Hospital and was sent to the Western front.

  "Fighting the Americans at night was easy," he said once. "You sat with your Schmeisser and fired bursts at the glow of cigarettes!" His family was wiped out in a bombing raid and he married an English girl whose family were all killed in the Blitz! The CMC were Men’s men, one and all. They had a rule "No women allowed in CMC huts," and it was only a year previously they allowed women into Craigieburn.

  "It was wonderful," said one woman to me. "They all went tramping, climbing or skiing every weekend, it was like a new disease, they had no resistance whatever! By the end of the winter every one of us that came up here to ski was married!"

  One left cars down on the flat and walked a mile or two up through the birchwood to the huts, along a path. There was a club hut and a score of little chalets, privately owned which could sleep half-a-dozen. We took turns in running the tow, and boiling up for smoko! Most of the men, were like myself, old Expedition hands, and a high standard was set, the effect on teenage boys being quite magical. Once there was a three-day snowstorm and we were short of food so John Robertson, myself and another elected to go down to the car park and pack in another 1501bs or so. I pointed to an obviously reluctant sixteen-year-old who had been avoiding any hut duty and was being a proper pain.

  "You can come too!" He protested in vain, John Robertson merely chuckled.

  "Better get your boots on fast, it’s cold on bare feet in the snow!" –

  We ploughed up through the woods in deep soft snow, laughing and exchanging Old Expedition stories, the young lad soon settled down and proudly carried a good load back, we called him "Sherpa Bill". When we arrived back he was the envy of all the other teenagers, he had been accepted to go on a difficult mission by the Big Expedition Men, and he was overheard doing some not-so-quiet bragging to his peers!

  "And do you know what Mr Robertson said? He said that in the Karakoram the porters were so bad he used to make them a cup of tea in the morning to encourage them to carry. And do you know what? He said I was better than any Hunza!"

  One has to watch them at this stage, that they don't kill themselves trying to earn your approval, or to justify their acceptance into a superior male group. The CMC had a fairly simple way of bringing up young lads, "You will do your duty as laid down by an older member or, Out!"

  A couple of years in the Antarctic had had its effect, I would ski a week and never fall over! Dog-sledding on ski in sloppy bindings is quite fun, but there is something faintly ridiculous about falling over and getting up to see dogs, sledge, a months' provisions, your tent and all vanishing over the horizon with Base six hundred miles away! So one never fell over, but one’s style suffered! Added to which, in our two-year absence, the technique had changed, now one used a reverse shoulder swing, more or less facing down the hill at all times and swinging the ski from side to side. It was an improvement and did not take long to pick up.

  "Neffer," said a young Swiss girl, "Haf I seen someone improve so fast as you haf, Bernhardt!" and I was still childish enough to be quite overcome. We went ski-touring along the range to North Canterbury field and I found that, though I had been determined never to do the old Christie turns, that in mountains, around rocks, sometimes in deep powder, sometimes on ice, one might need to snow-plow, Christie, jump-turn or even telemark at times.

  In 1958 we spent a couple of weeks at Mount Cheeseman, near Craigieburn, but with the hut rather higher, on the lip of a hanging valley. We reached the hut at night in deep snow and someone who had helped carry a pack threw it down on the floor of the hut.

  "Careful!" said I, sharply.

  "Why, got some bottles in it, av yer?" I unstrapped it and Alasdair, aged about two emerged to some exclamations from the others. Maternal girls baby-sat while Tania skied, and one day he sat on a box, coiling a rope and throwing it out.

  "What are you doing?" asked the baby-sitter.

  "I'm roping Cattle Beasts!" he said with disdain. The next day it was "Catching sharks!" and next day he looked bored.

  "Why don't you catch some more sharks?"

  "Because I caught them all yesterday!"

  In Canberra, Australia, they made me an honorary member of the Canberra Ski Club and they had a hut down at Perisher Valley, and to my surprise, skiing amongst the snowgums at Perisher, Thredbo or Smiggins Holes could be - as good as anywhere in the world. And so it went on for the next twenty years. In Eastern Canada we skied every weekend on one of thirty resorts in the Laurentians or the Eastern Townships or in New England, at Avila, Mont Tremblant, Mount Orford, Lake Placid or Bromont, skiing on trails through woods, always on powder snow because of the cold, but the cost went up. What, at Craigieburn was 2/6 a day on the tow and 3/6 a night in the hut, became $4, then $6, then $8 a day on the T-bars, teleferics, chairlifts and aerial trams in North America. Now it is $60 a day but I get a big reduction as a geriatric!

  The crowds grew, great herds of unknown sheep, pushing forward in the queues, sliding their edges over the tops of your nice Strato-Rossingol skis. The style changed again, the crowds were not aficionados, they were tourists who could only afford four days and might never ski again, so a style was developed with feet wide apart and a weight shift which on hard-packed icy piste would get them down the hill. Gone was the grace of the Donny MacDonalds, the Carl Burchers and the Willi Hubers.

  After forty years or so I dislocated an arm in a fall on Ruapehu and who do you think brought me down the Mountain? Why, Graham Ayres, the son of Harry, my old guide boss; Arnold Heine, that old stalwart that climbed the First Antarctic Mountain with me and Warren thirty-three years before, and at the Top O' the Bruce, there was Jim Lowery, standing tall on his tin feet and leaning on a ski pole. I only lost some toes on that same accident years ago but I still limp a bit. He led me into a hut where they were having a Handicapped Persons ski-week and it seemed an appropriate place to be. A motherly woman bustled up.

  "Do you have a coloured scarf with a map of Antarctica on it?" she demanded.

  "Why, yes," I said wonderingly. "They gave it to me when we went South about 32 years back!"

  "I made it for you!" said she. "Have a cup o' tea!"

  It seemed it would be the end, but 1989 I was back in the Antarctic and there was the Castle Rock ski-field and a rope tow, Coronet Peak all over again. A solid week and thirty years rolled away. The climate seemed to have changed, the snow was soft, not gritty and one night at 10p.m. by the midnight sun I saw a girl skiing in jeans, a T-shirt and light windbreaker!

  "My God!" said an ex ski-instructor from Minnesota. "How long you bin skiing, Man?"

  "Oh, about forty years," I laughed.

  "Man, if Ah kin ski like you do in another thirty years, Ah sure will be happy!”

• Chapter 16 - Visitors

  While, unlike Mount Aspiring, we did not go three months without seeing a strange face, visitors were not common before The War and The Bomb, and it could be weeks or a month or so. To be sure, the weekly Store cart would leave a parcel up at the gate, and after 1930 the weekly mail delivery became a three times a week affair being left at The Bridge half a mile away but this was hardly human contact. The odd stock-buyer from Wright-Stevensons, the occasional truck driver, that was all, so social contacts had to be organised, inevitably by the women folk, to this day few men would organise a social event. Picnics might be held with neighbours, not simple affairs, as pride demanded that vast amounts of food would be taken, with elaborate cream sponges with strawberry whipping, and horses and gigs had to be washed and polished, chaff and nose-bags for horses, and always rifles for, if all else failed, some target shooting, and children had to be clean, and without rents in their trousers.

  More than once, there were picnics at Kidd's Bush at The Neck, on Lake Hawea, with the Templetons and Morrises who had cars. Winding around Lake Hawea was an agony as I was inevitably car-sick, but at The Neck the fire would be lit and the black billies boiled and we competed in skipping flat stones over the deep blue lake. Then a swim which was a terrifying experience as the Hawea suddenly drops off vertically at The Black Line only a chain or two from shore, the bottom being below sea-level. In a dry summer, the birchwood was so cool, dripping and so different that we wandered in it, silent and staring. After food, the younger men would take rifles up the mountainsides looking for deer, the older men would shoot at targets or at bottles thrown out in the lake.

  Old grandfather Morris would stretch out his lean body on the beach, squint with his one good eye along the sights of his old Martiny-Henry and the bobbing bottle would shatter as echoes caromed round the hills. Father had cups for shooting and like all men of that era, prided himself on a degree of skill with the weapon, and could be counted on never to miss. Then a drive a few miles further to visited the Meads of Ben Weavis tucked into a narrow strip of sloping land between mountain and lake, they being friends of Mother’s.

  "Why don't we see more deer, Mr Mead?" I asked old Jack once.

  "Oh there's quite a few about, boy," said he. "We had an old hind who was raiding our potatoes but she always left too early in the morning to get a shot at her. But I noticed she always ran between two trees so I rigged a wire snare and got her that way! There were a lot a few years ago when we were not allowed to shoot and they did a lot of damage. Six us went up on the tops at the back there and in six days we shot six hundred! That thinned them out a bit!"

  Ben Weavis’ homestead was covered in water when Lake Hawea was dammed, but one of the Mead boys has now bought Dingleburn, across the Lake, and now the wool comes down by the new road, not by launch and barge as it used to. Timaru Creek also lost their flat land and the Riley’s have gone, but their hill country is now part of Dingleburn.

  Neighbours would be invited to Sunday dinner, especially those with cars. The Studholme’s would come in their Model T Ford which gave an extra fillip of interest, the big question being, would the Model T get back up The Terrace?

  Now, Mrs Studholme, a kindly woman, definitely had a weight problem and Mother nicknamed her "Birdie" by which name she came to be known for miles. When they left we would gather outside, while Mr Studholme cranked the Ford, and warmed her up and then set out at the road up the terrace at full speed. Half way up, he would push in the second gear pedal but the car would go slower and slower and stop. He would back down and try again. Sometimes he got up, with the Studholme boys, Neil and George, pushing, sometimes in reverse which was a lower gear and once we had to hook up the horses!

  If our visitors brought children we were expected to amuse them, not difficult with so many miles of open country, we could always take a rifle and climb Mount Iron and get a few rabbits. Once, visiting the Studholme’s, we spent the afternoon being entertained at a rabbit warren with several ferrets, rabbit nets and a greyhound. The ferrets drove the rabbits out of holes, and those that missed the nets were run down by the greyhound which closed in on them at appalling speed. Entertaining girls was different, they inevitably wore neat muslin and cotton frocks which did not allow them to climb trees, sit on tarry thwarts on the flattie on the lagoon or pole a raft, they were inevitably shy and we were relieved when afternoon tea meant they could be escorted back to the house. Some girls were different, notably Pat Aspinall who could not only ride better than we could but was not a bad hand with a .22 rifle!

  Once we visited Dave Morris and his wife at Mount Barker, on a farm once owned by Roger Halliday and later by the Maxwell family. Olive Templeton of my own age (about 5 or 6 at the time) was staying with her uncle and aunt and we were turned outside to play. She soon had a wonderful idea;

  "Let’s go and visit Granny Morris, I know the way!"
  We walked off down the road hand in hand between Hawthorne hedges, the distance could not have been a couple of miles but it seemed for ever. We took a shortcut through Ballantyne’s oats paddock, and we were soon totally lost, the oats being twice our height. Eventually we emerged on the road again and found Morris Mains as it is now called.

  "We've just come to visit, Granny!" Mrs Morris looked a little quizzical.

  "I think I'll just call them on the telephone and let them know you are here!"
  Then it was pikelets with raspberry jam and milk for afternoon tea and soon father appeared with the horse and trap, neat in a suit and bowler hat, they having been scouring the country for us. The relief was such we were not even told we were naughty!

  Lady Sutherland-Ross always visited when they came to Pembroke and she sometimes brought her cousin, Lady Inkster, who, it was said, was a Bowes-Lyon and cousin to the Queen. Once they were accompanied by another very Victorian lady in bustled skirt and buttoned boots whose conversation was to me, as I leaned round the door, quite fascinating.

  "My wretched husband thought of nothing but shooting, you know," said she. "If it wasn't some dreadful rhinoceros in Africa it was lions or buffalo. Well, he once decided to go after elephants in northern Burma. Well! Absolutely months on those wretched howdahs as they call them on a lurching elephant, rain, mud, rivers and jungle! And the servants! There wasn't one of them could make a decent cup of teal But I taught them! By the time we came back from safari some of them were quite passable!"

  In these conversations "The Dear Queen" always referred to Queen Victoria, not to the serious Queen Mary, and I overheard slightly scandalous tales of Prince Edward and Lily Langtry, "So difficult for the Dear Queen!" Puzzled by the expressions whenever Lily Langtry's name was mentioned I once asked Mother what she had done.

  "She was very naughty!" said Mother with classic understatement. "Beautiful, but, oh! So naughty! Now go outside and play!" The chauffeur, Mr Faye, would sit on the river bank tossing pebbles in the water waiting for his Mistress to conclude the visit. At times he would ask permission to go for a shot with his 410 shotgun and I might walk with him, but his conversation was quite prosaic after that going on over the teacups! Some of those little old Victorian ladies made the present radical feminists look positively limp by comparison, but some of the younger women also took on tasks one would normally have expected a man to do. Once Mrs A[spinall] turned up from Mount Aspiring, driving a remuda of five horses, having spent the first night at Glendhu. She stayed two days while they were all shod by Charley Templeton, mounted up again and, neatly dressed in jodhpurs, tan riding boots and a tweed jacket with a piece of chiffon at the neck, left on the thirty-mile ride home. The men, it seemed, could not be spared for such a minor task.

  
  Seldom did a human being enter the gate without being asked to a meal, and if the sun was past Mount Burke (which meant 3p.m.) asked to spend the night. Visitors meant that instead of a quiet evening reading by the light of the kerosene light or playing rummy, a hilarious evening with tales of the trail and of the great Stations for fifty miles about would go on till midnight.

  Mr A of Mount Aspiring would call in on the cattle drive, turning the Herefords into a paddock and I might be allowed to unsaddle Peggy. Once I picked up his stockwhip which was coiled on his saddle and essayed a crack, nearly laying open the back of my neck in the process!

  There would be little warning of an impending visit, Mother would stare up at the front gate where milling cattle, horse and dogs and cracking stockwhips could be seen and heard.

  "Who on earth can that be? Go and look boys!"

  Soon we would be back, dancing with excitement, "It's Mount Aspiring, Mum! It's Mr A, Mr A, look he's on Peggy and there's Scotty with Jerry up, and Stewart on Patty!"

  "Get me some wood!" would be the next cry as tradition demanded that guests must be welcomed with a cup of tea.

  Soon the cattle would have been turned out and the stockmen cantering up to the house, sunburnt and fit after days on the trail, slickers tied across pommels, stockwhips in hand, sliding out of the saddle and throwing the reins to us waiting children.
  "Jack, how marvellous to see you! How many days from Aspiring? Come awa ben!" and we children would lead the horses away.
  Like many drovers, Mr A seemed to have an odd sense of humour at times. On one visit he was soon roaring with laughter. Coming round the Glendhu Bluff with several hundred head, it seemed a car frightened the lead animals which piled over the bluff into the lake followed by the entire herd.

  "We were two days roundin’ them up !" cackled he. "Some swam round to Glendhu, some to Ewings Point, one decided to go to Mount Burke and we last saw him a dot in the middle o' the lake. Some got in some bush, I got off m' horse and tied 'er up and went in with m' stockwhip. The first one charged and I shot up a saplin' and I called out to Jerry, 'Look ut there !' and the beast charged him so here we were up two saplin's like a couple of birds, ho! ho! har! har!"

  Tale would follow tale, and reminisces of mutual adventures which seemed no less humorous in that we all knew the punch line. Even the story of how on one occasion Mr A and son Jerry were coming round the same Glendhu bluff in the newly acquired Buick light truck, Jerry pointed to something out in the lake, the Buick dropped over the bank, rolled, and stopped on a ledge above the deep water, was laughed over, but in a rueful way. I later saw the Buick in Manson's garage, the fabric and wood cab completely crushed and I shivered.

  A favourite droving tale of Mr A's was the story of The Bull in the China Shop. The Mount Aspiring herd had reached Cromwell on the way to the railhead and all the people turned out as they usually did, blocking side streets and urging them on. Then something spooked an old Hereford bull.

  "He turned back up th' street," Mr A would cackle. "Charged a few people on a side street an' they sca"ered like chickens, knocked over a few barrels and then wandered into a store. Th' store keeper panicked 'n bolted ut th' back and every time the old bull turned down crashed somethin' else. A didn' wa' a give him a cut o' th' whip or he would have knocked th' walls down, but we finally go' him u' o' there. My God! By that time there were about two hunnerd people watchin'!"

  Once Mr A returned from a drive with Scotty in the spring cart and the rain poured down. Next day we looked up valley, where lighting flashed from jet black cloud and the rain teemed.
  "The river will be up, John," said Mother anxiously, "I think you should stay another night."

  "A' should go, Miz Gunn," said he. "It’s Speargrass, if I wait it'll be a banker. If I can't cross that ah can cut back t’ Glendhu, Willis will put me up! Phoebes will be alright, and I can stay at Niger, maybe swim the horse over! No, thank ye, I must go." Only minutes later he left, with Scotty at a smart trot, clad in oil-skins and his felt hat pulled low, with whip in hand, through the driving rain. The ruts of the trap wheels remained for years printed in the soft ground but now they have gone. He was in fact able to cross Speargrass but spent at least one night at Niger Hut before crossing that awful tide that the Matuki becomes in flood.

  The road from Aspiring was never simple. One day the whole family arrived in the Buick covered in mud and thirteen-year-old Pat was simmering.

  "We got stuck in Boil-the-Billy," she said. "And that Dave Aubrey came past in a three-ton truck with half a dozen men. He got out, and stood with his hands on hips, roared with laughter, and drove away. If I could have reached him I would have smacked his face!"
  There were almost no tourists in the 1930's but every Christmas period a few dedicated campers would come to fish. As the years passed, they acquired their own preferred places under the willows and poplars by the river and were quite distressed if a newcomer was allowed to camp too close. We gave them fresh vegetables, peas, broad and runner beans, potatoes, carrots, perhaps raspberries, eggs, butter and milk and there were long debates when some of them would insist on paying. It seemed intrinsically wrong to charge friends (as they had become) for food, nor would we have dreamed of asking for money for two or three weeks camping. It began with Mr Parkinson of Broad Bay who had a round Bell tent and always wore three-piece suits with a watch chain in front. Then Dr Carswell in a stately dark blue and black Plymouth, in which he and his teenage son Bill (who later also became a doctor and a surgeon in the Middle East) slept, with a small but high green tent with a flat which extended over the roof of the car. Dr Carswell was the most skilful fisherman, taught us to tie flies and to fish and was mercilessly roped in by Mother to consult on difficult medical cases. He was a mild, whimsical man with an inexhaustible fund of funny stories. One day young Bill came up to the house looking perturbed.

  "I say, someone hasn't been playing a joke have they?" he asked. It turned out that our six-month-old Jersey calf, Teresa, had forced her way into the tent while they were away fishing and eaten two pounds of prunes and generally wrecked their tidy camp. Even that could be laughed over years later.

  One day father encountered a short, stout irascible man thrashing the water violently and invited him to move his distant camp to our riverside. Captain Kerr from Geraldine was a retired Master Mariner and had a beautiful caravan built from a massive Knight car. He rarely caught a fish, but enthralled us with tales of rounding the Horn in Windjammers.

  "I was an apprentice," he said once. "So I was only expected to do day work, but one night I heard the Mate call 'all hands on deck, and reef the fore t'gallans'I!' and I thought 'I'll help reef that sail.' We took up the clewlins and buntlins and went aloft and it was blowing a full gale. The bunt of the sail blew up over the yard and I was knocked off and I fell but as I passed the tops'I yard, I caught the foot rope and I managed to scramble back! All I could hear was the Mate swearing at me from on deck for being so slow! Always remember, one hand for the ship and one for yourself!" I did remember, and once many years later when aloft on a brigantine in mid-Atlantic furling a sail in the dark I found myself urging the young trainee sailors, "Remember, one hand for the ship and one for yourself!"

  Another of his tales concerned being washed overboard when "Rounding the Horn", perhaps on the Garthpool. More than once Captain Kerr took us for picnics to places like Timaru Creek which seemed to be a favourite spot of his. He rarely caught a fish but the choleric little man was universally doted on.
  Mr Ted Elliot, a radio salesman, camped often until he built a house locally and through him we acquired our first radio in about 1939, in time to hear the King solemnly intoning those awful words, "…and so we are now at War!" Another fisherman Dr Hercus and his friend Dr Bevan-Brown always camped over the river and put a towel on a flax bush when they needed more milk and vegetables. I would be rewarded with a chocolate biscuit which we had never before encountered. Sir Charles (as he later was) asked if another friend of his could come to camp, Sir Robert Aitken, the Vice Chancellor of the University. The Aitkens were a charming couple originally from Edinburgh, and their serious older daughter was doing a degree in physics. The younger, eleven-year old Eleanor, she of the sparkling eyes and dancing vivacity, was probably the most intelligent person I have ever met. It was a new experience to strain to keep up a conversation with a ten-year old who one moment might be speaking of riding camels in the desert and the next of India or the glens of Scotland.

  I was about seventeen and she developed an overwhelming crush on me as girls that age sometimes do. One night she demanded I come into her tent to say good night over the laughing protests of her parents, flung her arms round my neck for a warming kiss, dived under blankets giving cries of joy, "I kissed him, I kissed him!"

  "We apologise for our daughter!" said Sir Robert very seriously. "She is a little hard to control at times!"

  Then there was Roland Ellis, Mr E of Arthur Ellis & Co, The Mill in the Valley, who in 1939, mindful of the uncertainties of war, towed a large caravan to "The Poplars" with his big eight cylinder Auburn car, and left it there "For the Duration" together with a stock of food and drums of petrol. Fifty years later it is still there and used by the family. He also left a light wood and aluminium canvas canoe, which with typical generosity he said we might use. He little knew the difference it made to our prosaic lives, shooting the rapids, plugging up the fast reaches, cunningly using the back-eddies, up and out
  on the Lake, to Mount Burke Peninsula and to rocky islands, the portages round rapids, the long fast sweep home, it added to our lives. Later, in northern Quebec as we portaged up the Waswanipi, the Chibougamau, the Misstassini, old Charlie Kepussasit, my Cree guide once said, "I think you bin in canoe before!" What would life have been without our visitors?

• Chapter 17 - School

  Remarkably few children enjoy school, perhaps because it is very unnatural to herd large numbers of children of a single age together. It is remarkable how much more mature ten-year-old Asian children are who have never been to school, but live among adults. The last thing we in Wanaka could have complained of was the pressure of numbers of our own age, at times Wanaka School as our local school-in-the-pine trees at Alberttown was known had as few as 7 children and never more than 14.

  The first teacher I remember was a Miss Kania, I think she boarded with us for a short time before I began in 1932. She was dark and slim and from her name, of Dalmatian origin. There was a tennis tournament held at the school, the tennis court (still visible if one knows where to look) was freshly marked out in white paint with a new net, Miss Kania was arrayed in smart whites and the local young blades like Lin and Ernie Morris, Jack Bovett, Rainer Collings and others dashed about the court.

  Then we had a Mr Campbell who also boarded with us and father refused to take any payment.

  "I don't feel good about not paying for my board or doing anything," the teacher said once.

  "Well," said father, "If you want to do something it would be a help if you could chop some wood!" In those days we did not have a saw bench and manuka was brought in to the back yard by horse and sledge and reduced to stove-sized length by means of an axe and a strong arm. Of course, with a lot of practice, swinging and axe is no big deal, without a lot of practice it is pure torture, and I peeped out the shed door to see him massaging his back, and he soon came in with blistered hands. He was a "softy" and could only be expected to be regarded disparagingly from then on.

  Reluctantly I was taken to school by my older brother Derek. It was all terribly confusing, you were expected to do all kind of strange things, write on slates etc. To begin with one didn't attempt to write, one scribbled linked circles etc on the slate. The teaching could not have been that good, as my generation never acquired the copper-plate writing of the Victorian generation, though we were much more legible that later generations many of whom cannot write at all.

  Later, a Mr Waldron introduced me to mathematics and we used to chorus the times table, half a dozen of us at a time, how well I remember, "six fives are thirty, six sixes are thirty six, six sevens are forty two ..." much like children in Nepal learn English today. Now this is no longer done and ask an eighteen year old what six sevens are and you get a blank stare.

  Under Mr Waldron I progressed to writing "14 x 3 = 42" which was pronounced "fourteen times 3 equals forty two!"

  Then he said, (in the short intervals that could be spared from teaching standard three, four, five and six) that we are to use a new method called multiply which used a big X. In an agony of misunderstanding I plucked Derek's sleeve, "What does multiply mean?"

  "Times," he replied.

  However, Mr Waldron said this was wrong, "Multiply" was not the same as "Times".

  To this day and years of computing later, I still cannot imagine what he meant.

  We had long Rimu desks, and the bigger children used scratchy pens dipped in China inkwells periodically filled from a large bottle. Ink could make a frightful mess, and blue fingers were ubiquitous. We younger ones used slates and Olive Templeton invented a game, one held out one's nice new slate pencil and either struck your opponent's or was in turn struck, however the result was always the same, my elegant slate pencil was shattered and for weeks I had to write with the stubs. Hers were more massive, they looked like strips of Welsh slate. By the time we reached standard six, the old Rimu desks were replaced by neat single tables each with a lift-up green painted top - very smart.

  For me the highlight of the week was reading, and on Friday afternoon teacher would read. Miss Wilson (who married Ernie Morris) read us "Wind in the Willows" and sixty years later the doings of Mole, Ratty and Toad are part of my psyche. The school Journals which we received about once a month were often very good, especially a thrilling tale of quite grown-up children sailing their boat (just like ours on the lagoon) but striking a rock and the girl (Titty) swimming ashore salvaging the telescope. Half a century later I recognised this as one of the Swallows and Amazons epics by J. Arthur Ransome. Like R.L.S., Ransome was a sailor and it shows in his writing.

  Books were in short supply but Mrs Ross (or Lady Ross as she became) sent us copies of “Meccano Magazine” and "Boys Own Paper" and later "The Aeroplane" which were ideal. We had a Meccano set and on wet days built elaborate cranes and trolleys as rain pounded the tin roof, and drips which came through odd bullet-holes in the roof, went 'plink!", "plunk!", "plank!", "plank!" into the glass jars we spread around to catch them. One Xmas I was given a clockwork motor which could wind up a hook from six feet down a stairwell.

  Meccano Magazine vividly showed the trains of the period and I could recognise a 4-6-2 tank locomotive at a glance. In India twenty-five years later I was overjoyed to see their mighty twin-boiler engines of the mighty "Punjab Mail" often shown in the magazine, and only recently, in Masterton, in a Museum, the Fell locomotives which once pulled trains over the Rimutaka and which the magazine had once shown, the Fell machines having extra horizontal drivers gripping a central rail and are known by rail buffs world-wide.

  Both Meccano Magazine and "Boys Own" showed romantic flying machines, usually biplanes with glamourous-looking pilots with goggles and scarves, and such a fill-up did they give to the imagination that I imagine that is why I fly today.

  Georgette Keep (whose father once worked for my Grandfather in Britain) was also a keen reader and we exchanged books on rare visits or sent them by Perrow's store cart. "Girls Crystal" was rather feeble after the "BOP" and all those delinquent girls at a private girls school might get up to mischief but it was rather tame stuff after Tuggy Wilson and his scout troop and his efforts to control the spoilt, rich and delinquent "Girlie".

  Another gift of Mrs Ross was the "Scouts Annual"  - a massive volume of tiny print but whose tales of racing car thrillers, spy hunts, "Duel in the Clouds", struck just that right mix of adventure, technology and good writing that left one totally absorbed. Most of the tales would be banned now as being racist, sexist, militarist etc. Some of these tales were so absorbing that I would slip out of school, make my way home quickly and try to make our bedroom upstairs in the cottage quietly without my mother hearing and get in a quiet hour's reading. If she detected I was home, It would be "Bernard, get some wood, get some water, tidy up the yard!" or some other distracting chore.

  Staff Weatherall was a great fan of "Westerns", cheap coloured comics of cowboys, and tales of quick draws of heavy forty-fives. The intellectual content was low, but it was rather surprising to later live in Texas and find the life on the range was not in fact too different to that portrayed in the "Westerns". Texans are in fact, as a visiting Montana cowboy once said, "A mite proddy with the gun!"

  In retrospect apart from the ability to write rather badly, read and do very elementary mathematics, a far greater part of education of at least my education came from reading at home, perhaps this explains why the current generation who do not read at all are so illiterate.

  After about 1936 we had a succession of young women teachers who immediately married one of the local farmers. Charley Templeton once bet some blushing new teacher that she would be married by the end of the year which she indignantly denied. He won with three months to spare.

  Eudora Hughes was a serious and likeable young woman, who soon married Maurice Deveraux, back from the war and who was driving a truck for the Reid’s at Luggate. He soon took up a large rehab farm near Millers Flat. Miss Hughes, (or M'Shoes) as we rather wilfully pronounced it) was boarding with us, and I can recall she and Maurice dancing to the music of the gramophone in our kitchen-cum-living room. About twenty years later when I was Professor at the University of Montreal in Canada I received a phone call from a young woman.

  "I think you might have known my mother in New Zealand," she said, "her name was Deveraux!"

  "I not only knew her, I was there when she announced her engagement and remember the day she married and the day you were born. Come and stay!"

  School work was seldom interesting and we looked forward intently to play-time, the hands of the large ticking hand-wound clock taking an age to reach XII or Ill. When it did there was a blind rush for the door. We tended to play games for weeks on end and then some brighter person would say, "Why don't we play ..." and there would be a change.

  One game to which I could not give a name consisted of two courts of adjoining squares about four yards wide by five deep with a team in each. One at a time we had to make a run for a distant base without being tagged. Some of the kids were good at making a mad dash from the back of the court, checking to put their opponent off balance and then making a sprint. Screams of "You're out!", "I was not, I still had a foot in!", echoed round the pine trees.

  Hide and Go Seek gave a lot of scope as the school grounds covered about 10 acres and could have hidden an army. The seeker buried his or her face in their arms on a certain tree which still stands, and the rest scattered, sometimes the seeker could search for a quarter hour without result and was allowed to call out, "Whistle or cry or the game shall die!"

  A short whistle or squeak only gave a slight hint, and when the teacher blew the whistle impatiently for class, a dozen ragged children would erupt from some unlikely hiding place under the spreading branches of a distant pine.

  Cricket went on interminably in the summer with kerosene tins for wickets, the five or six per side. If one knocked a "four" or even a six, there were cries of protest at the distance a player had to go to retrieve it, as a six had to be lofted in the air over a distant bank. Then both teams might spend the next period trying to find the ball in the long grass.

  Football in winter was an atrocious game, on iron-hard frosted ground in the morning and mud in the afternoon. Our precious worn football became muddy and greasy, and if one of the more massive girls like Sheila Templeton got the ball, she would struggle on towards the goal with a dozen diminutive figures wrapped around each leg like terriers. Maurice Anderson who had had polio and wore a leg brace threw himself into all these games and I fear we allowed him very little compensation for his handicaps.

  The coming of sports day meant digging a pit and intensively practicing the hop-step-and-jump and the broad jump especially. When sports day came, the teams from Pembroke, Wanaka, (Alberttown as the oldest school, was called "Wanaka"), Hawea, Tarras, Ardgour, Queensbury and Cardrona. We all wore sashes, ours being scarlet and Pembroke black, Hawea blue, Ardgour was a kind of orange and I think Queensberry maroon. Pembroke tended to dominate from weight of numbers but there were occasions when Wanaka won, one or two of the right age could swing the numbers.

  We booed vindictively whenever black won something and fights would erupt at the back of the crowd, at times we were just a little provocative as in the time when with a blind rush we seized their black flag which was being waved arrogantly with what seemed lack of respect, and we ran pursued by a wave of ferocious Pembrokians howling for our blood. They overtook us and a boy I particularly disliked, Walter Robertson, threw some punches. A lucky right hook and he dropped to the ground to cheers of, "Up Wanaka, down with black!" while David Templeton ostentatiously wiped his bare feet on their precious silk flag. At this point several teachers rather meanly intervened with threats of "The Strap".

  Children soon revert to tribal instincts.

  Rounders was another game when someone could scrounge a cast-off tennis racket, another game was house building, piling up pine needles under an overhanging pine branch which served as a roof, or laying branches across in a flat roof Mexican adobe style and piling needles on top. As houses they were warm, stuffy and usually lacking headroom and smelt like a bear pit.

  The month of February was often intolerably hot and we would take the afternoon off and trail over the paddocks to a hole in the Cardrona Creek where with a bit of dam building, a swimming hole could be formed. One year or two, the Cardrona not having any suitable holes, we would cross the bridge and swim in the cold Clutha under a giant willow, keeping a watchful eye for eels which often tunnel into willow roots.

  My daughter learnt to swim and dive in Montreal in a vast sports complex, everything tiled and heated, with a bubble cushion to soften the impact from the high dive, but I am not sure that our holes in the creek were not more fun.

  Winter was a hard time as shoes would be still damp from the day before and would freeze still. Up at 6:30 or 7, two cows to milk, home to porridge, sugar and cream for breakfast with perhaps an egg, do the separating which meant winding on the "Alfa Laval" hand separator for quarter of an hour, then Mother might say, "Time for school, I'll wash the separator, your lunch is cut!"

  The roads would be frozen but one could skate on the ice in puddles. At school there would a great fuss about lighting the pot-bellied stove with pine cones and at lunch we would cluster as close as possible, toasting our sandwiches on the hot iron and also our shoes which were always wet and cold.

  By 3:15 the air would be warm in the winter sun, the ice gone from the roads and replaced by slush and mud around which we would try to hop to keep shoes as dry as possible. Passing horses and carts and the occasional car threw up spraying mud, drays and ponderous trucks sometimes got stuck. Snow of course meant that all was abandoned in favour of snowball fights, building snowmen and tobogganing.

  In winter the sheep had to be fed hay and taking a short cut across paddocks after school, the hay had to be cut with a hay knife and forked out into racks, a good hour's hard work. Then milk the cows and feed out oats or lucerne from another stack to the two cows and horse, arriving home just before dark with separating to be done before tea as well as get in a stack of firewood. In the evening some homework or else playing cards or draughts in the yellow circle of a kerosene lamp, or quietly absorbed in a book.

  About 1937ish we acquired a battery-powered Philco radio with large glowing valves powered by enormous 45 volt batteries and a 6 volt rechargeable. There were some absorbing serials on the radio, "Prisoner of Zenda", "Singapore Spy" and others and sometimes to our horror, the battery would be too flat. I have leapt on a bicycle, pedalled three miles into Wanaka with the battery in a box on the carrier, exchanged it for our other one charging in Manson's garage and pedalled home again to get at least the last half of the program.

  Summer holidays used to take an age to come and were rather marred by the fact that it coincided with "Haymaking", at least three days of toiling in intolerable heat, forking up tons of hay. In about 1945 when hay-time came round, Lin Morris said, "Why don't you take the Farmall?" and I mowed a hay field in an hour or two and baled it in the same. Now, why couldn't the Farmall have been invented about ten years earlier? True the old McCormick Deering 16-40's and whining Fordsons had been doing the ploughing for some years but even starting them was a day's work at times.
  Saturdays were never days of rest as inevitably there was superphosphate to be spread, a fence just fallen down, lambs to be marked, but Sundays, ah, now there was a day. One could milk the cows later and after a gorgeous dinner with Yorkshire pudding, take a rifle and wander over Mt Iron or up river and get a dozen or so bunnies. My best ever day was one where Mr E loaned me a new Winchester and by a quick pass over some of the best shooting areas, Cardrona Creek, Mt Iron, the back fence of the farm, and up-river, the bag was 22 for 23 shots. These days Charlie Hollows goes over the same ground at night with a four-wheel trail bike and a spotlight and automatic shotgun and gets 60 for 61 shots!

  Eventually I managed to pass my special bugbear, mathematics, which should have been no great hurdle as it consisted of multiplying a four figure number by a three figure one. One then graduated to High School. It was the very first year a High School had operated in Wanaka, the previous year some of the older kids, e.g., Trevor Umbers, Rae Scott, Mollie Morrow had gone to High School in Cromwell by means of an hour or more in the bus each way. This year, about 1940, there were at least a dozen of us, the main High School being the Supper Room of the Hall.
  We seemed to learn things painfully slowly, puzzling over geometry, algebra, etc. Geography was easy, History rather puzzling with much memorising of dates. However, now I have come to the thought that perhaps one of the most necessary of all attainments is a knowledge of one’s cultural background. English of which I had done nothing was baffling, as it was taken on Wednesday afternoon by the Headmaster, Mr Tait and he did not enlighten me as to what "a subjunctive clause governed by the verb 'to be"' might mean. Some of the others took French which seemed to me to be rather silly. How was I to know that I would spend twenty years in various French and Spanish-speaking countries and would even have to be able to read Portuguese and would have to go hungry on occasion because Portuguese, though very like Spanish in written form, sounds like a drunken Pole trying to speak Russian?

  Even Geography, which I like was not to be of much use. In 1965 we were driving across Canada and I could recite, "Calgary, centre of beef and wheat farming, population, 64,000; Montreal, a major port, Population, 300,000". There seemed to be something wrong as Calgary was a booming modern city and Montreal had a population of about three million. Unfortunately they had grown since 1935 when our books were written. Luckily History does not change and I suppose the very basic maths we did still survives in some form. We did not acquire many social graces, saying "Hello" to a stranger was a painful experience, and though half the class was female we did not really associate with them, except to say “Hello” in the morning.

  At morning break, the girls sat by the lake or Bullock Creek and talked about girly things, we kicked a football about mainly. None of the girls married local boys and many of the boys stayed unmarried. I doubt I would have ever married myself had I remained in Pembroke. There was only one girl who was quite fun to talk to, Gwenda Manson who went away to school at Waitaki Girls or somewhere and returned after the war. I would meet her at dances and she was quite quick with the repartee and fun to dance with. However, one could not dance only with one girl as gossip would start so at that time I alternated between Gwenda, a school teacher from Hawea and odd others.

  Dances, held at rare intervals except near Xmas were delightful. Everyone came, grandmothers sat in the corners, men stood round the door, some of them far too shy to ask a girl to dance, girls sat round the walls on forms, and MacNamara’s Band played Canadian Two Steps, Mazurkas, The Gipsy Tap, The Alberts, the Highland Schottishe, and even the odd waltz. Bill Ironside who worked behind the counter at Jollies Store was usually the compere and one could hear his distinctive voice, "Two more couples this way please!", as he arranged the floor for the "Alberts".

  I would notice the odd girl sitting with her head down who had not danced all evening and by this time had enough confidence to walk over and ask. Often she would mutter, "No!" without even looking up, in other words, too shy to stand up. I soon learnt how to deal with this.

  "Of course you can!" I would say taking her hand firmly. "Now this is a Two Step, one step back one to this side and round, da-te-tum!" and after a few dances they would be getting quite good. Seeing this, other boys would ask them to dance and they would soon be seen thoroughly enjoying themselves. None of them ever said, "Thank you for teaching me!" but I had long since given up any such childish expectations. I was well known already as an unreliable person, here today, gone tomorrow, and of no interest to some serious female whose only earthly desire was to be married.

  Gwenda had some boyfriend somewhere and flatly refused to be taken to dances in case the rumour got back to him, "I'll see you there!" was the best I ever got from her, or for that matter anyone else.

  University and departure overseas separated us completely and I have seldom seen any of my "Class of '40" group again, an exception being Stafford Weatherall at Lake Ohau Station. I had been on some hair-raising (but successful) attempt on Mt McKerrow at the head of the Hopkins Valley in the August break of 1953 with a med student friend, Fred Hollows, and Anne Connyngham, another medical student who got frost-bitten feet. I appealed to Staff, who was delighted to see me and roared up the valley in his truck to rescue the distressed damsel, and entertained us royally.