Our Fortunate Lives

By Judy Boyd

Judy Boyd was born at Mataura, in Southland. She had to leave High School before her sixteenth birthday, to go home to the farm and house-keep for the family when her mother was ill. Four years later, she left home to train as a Karitane Nurse in Christchurch. Her parents went overseas for nine months after Judy graduated from Karitane; she returned to the farm to house-keep for her brother, during which time she took babies in at home while their parents were on holiday. Then Judy and Peter Boyd became engaged; he went to Australia on a working holiday, and when her parents returned, Judy also left for a six months working holiday in Australia.
After they married they lived in Taumarunui, Rangiora, New Plymouth, and Christchurch again, and during those first six years their three sons, Hamish, Dougal and Andrew were born. In 1974 they shifted out of town to twenty acres at Broadfields, half way between Hornby and Lincoln. Five years later they planted one and a half acres of blueberries: a thriving commercial venture.
At age forty-two, following a year at Mrs Ritchies Commercial College, Judy became a secretary at Lincoln University and after twelve years working there, she changed departments. Because the new job was only three days a week, she had plenty of time for study and enrolled in an English Degree by correspondence with Massey University. After three years in the new job, she retired from Lincoln, and enrolled at Canterbury University to complete her Honours degree in Creative Writing. Being at a loose end again, she heard about Grant Hindin-Millers Creative Writing courses at the Continuing Education Department of Canterbury University, and nine years later, in her eightieth year has finally finished her book and at last realized her dream of becoming a writer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris NZ
• Release date: Dec 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9781493192847

Book preview

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Our Early Lives

‘If you don’t hurry up and scatter your mother’s ashes your grandchildren will scatter them for you, all over the kitchen floor.’

Trudy warningly eyed the corner of the family room where a prettily wrapped box containing my mother’s ashes, resided in tantalizing proximity to my grand-children’s little fingers. As I hated the thought of scattering them, they’d been sitting there for a year or two; I rescued the box from Emily, and put it out of reach in the back of the hall cupboard while thinking, ‘Aha! At last! There’s the perfect beginning for my family stories: dialogue with impact and graphic imagery!’ Mum would have loved it.

It felt like Trudy had just dropped the whole book into my lap and I could hardly wait to begin. After another few years, Peter exhumed Mum’s ashes from the back of the hall cupboard, dug a deep hole in my rose garden and gently buried the box and, because she’d been an Auckland girl in her youth and her old age we planted a beautiful rose called Auckland Metropolitan over her grave.

That was sixteen years ago when Emily was nearly two and I’ve been writing this book ever since; now she’s eighteen and working hard in her first year at university down in Dunedin.

Our Mother

Our mother was a fiery lady, quick to cut sticks off the black-currant bush by the kitchen window to whack us with when we were naughty. She told me years later that it was hard to maintain anger when she’d look back and see our little noses squashed against the kitchen windows while watching her.

Although my mother was short and slim, only five feet three inches, she was a ball of muscle as my father said. In comparison, he was six feet three inches, a mostly gentle and loving man, but a succession of daughters being born was a disappointment to him, and ironically the two miscarriages Mum had were both boys. If he had still been alive he would have loved to have known that of his fifteen great-grandchildren, eleven were boys and only four were girls.

When you are a child your parents are taken for granted, but one day when I was six I saw that my mother was beautiful. She’d called in at school for me and walked into the classroom in a dark blue dress that I hadn’t seen before and when she bent down and kissed me in front of the whole class, I was near to bursting with pride at this gorgeous lady being my mother.

Mum’s name used to be Inez Anne Walker: one of a family of twelve children; she was born at Whananaki in the North Island and two of her siblings died young, a common fate in those days. One of them was Vernon who stayed in Mum’s mind forever. Their parents had left her and her big brothers in charge of Vernon, while they went to town. The boys decided to go to the river, and they took off leaving their ten years old sister in charge of three years old Vernon.

It was a hot day, Mum was bored and decided to take Vernon to the river. All the brothers were sitting on the other side, and the way over to them was across a fallen log. Sadly, Vernon fell off it and into the river; the big boys dived in and saved him, dried him off, and they all went home, but didn’t confess about Vernon’s mishap. That little boy became ill with pneumonia and died a few days later.

Mum’s father, Theodore Henry Adolphus Walker, was a schoolteacher and the family moved around the North Island until Granddad was appointed Headmaster of Otautau Primary School in Southland when my mother was twenty-one.

Mum had five years high schooling at Auckland Girls’ Grammar, a rarity in those days, and was in the top school hockey and swimming teams. She later represented the Auckland Province at both hockey and swimming and was resentful at having to leave Auckland’s social life for a village in the wilds of Southland. She had three little brothers: Erin, Mervyn and Desmond, and Grandma, Mary Anne Elizabeth Newport Walker (nee` Clark), needed her help with the family. However, Mum’s sporting fame preceded her and she soon found herself representing Southland at both swimming and hockey.

Mum’s maternal grandparents, the Clarks, were from Belfast. Her Grandfather was a scion of that family and due to share in a fortune in linen mills owned by the family but, unfortunately, he dallied with the children’s governess. She became pregnant and for this unfortunate blot on his family escutcheon, they were quickly married, and to avoid the censorious stares of Belfast society they were packed off to live at the bottom of the world, with enough furniture, linen, household effects and clothing to start their new life in Kerikeri, New Zealand.

Our Father

Our father, William Macdonald, was born at Rayland, Texas, in 1902, migrating to New Zealand at the age of six with his parents and seven brothers and sisters. He was one of a family of ten siblings, with an American mother, Virginia Belle Macdonald (nee` Rae) and a Scottish father, John Macdonald, from Campbeltown, Kintyre, Scotland. My Aunty Rae, who was the oldest of the children, told me there had been twelve babies born to that family: the first two died young and were buried on their farm in Texas.

Two more children, Aunty Jean and Uncle Charlie, were born after the family came to New Zealand and bought a farm down in Southland. They were a family of young giants with strong American accents and must have been something of a rarity in Otautau. When the First World War began New Zealand was sending troops overseas, and to avoid his elder sons being drafted into the army, our Granddad Macdonald sent them, John and Angus, back to safety in the USA. Ironically, they were both soon drafted into the American Armed Services instead. They survived that war, but didn’t return to New Zealand to live, and both settled in California instead.

Thus my father left Primary School aged twelve to work on his father’s farm, and was soon proficient at ploughing with teams of draught horses: in later years winning many silver cups at ploughing matches in both Southland and South Canterbury. When he was eighteen his father sent him up to Rakaia, to work on his friend Mr Cook’s farm.

My parents were physical people and led successful sporting lives but, because of coming from a sternly Presbyterian, non-drinking family, when the rest of his mates went into the pub after a game of out-of-town rugby, my father would wait in the back of the bus.

When Dad’s girlfriend was playing hockey one day he, with his sister Kate, watched her from the sideline playing in opposition to my mother’s team and running down the field locking sticks with another girl. That girl was my Mum and when Dad saw her hook her stick around his girlfriend’s ankle, he gasped to Kate, ‘The little bitch!’ However, that night at a dance, Mum noticed him staring at her and she cheekily winked at him. His sister, Kate, was Mum’s friend and she introduced them to each other and notwithstanding his previous impression, it was love at first sight or second sight in Dad’s case.

It must have been mutual because the next weekend when Dad was playing rugby and saw Mum watching from the sidelines, he ran over to her and said, ‘Could you hang onto these please,’ and taking out his dentures, he thrust them into her hands and raced off. Not an auspicious beginning to romance and a lifelong love affair, but my Mum was a hardy soul… My parents shared another hobby: they were avid readers and both read three library books a week, which habit they passed on to all their children.

Dad’s father bought farms in Southland for his three sons, one at Mataura for Dad, and one each for Uncle Sam and Uncle Charlie, at Oreti. Mum and Dad were married by then, and my brother Dougal was a toddler when they took over the farm at Mataura. They named that farm Bellfield after Dad’s grandparents’ tenant farm at Campbeltown on Kintyre, in Scotland. Following their marriage and the hard work of a farming life, clearly time for fame in the sporting field was over for them both which may have been responsible for Mum’s three other pregnancies plus two miscarriages over the next ten years…

Dad had several draught horses of which he was proud, and our stable was wallpapered with prize tickets that he’d won when exhibiting them at Southland’s Agricultural Shows. One such day, when Mum was getting Merle and Dougal dressed for the Invercargill Show, Mum gave Dougal’s hair a wee trim with the clippers. Then she said, ‘Now you kids just sit there and don’t move until I come back,’ as she raced away to get herself ready to go to the show.

Merle was easily bored, an intrepid child, so to pass the time, she applied her own tonsorial expertise to Dougal’s beautiful curls; she picked up the clippers and expertly ran them up the back of his neck and over the top of his head…

When Mum had Tuberculosis

When I was born Mum was twenty-eight but, by the time I was nine months old, she’d begun coughing up blood. This was the story as she told it to me.

‘Coughing up blood frightened me into going to the doctor, only to have my worst fears confirmed by Doctor Woodhouse.’

‘I’m afraid it’s tuberculosis, Mrs Macdonald. You will have to go to the Waipiata Sanatorium. What will you do with the baby?’

You looked up at me with your big trustful eyes, entirely unaware that within days you’d be weaned and sent to Invercargill to live with Rae, my sister-in-law, her husband Willie, and their six children: Raymond, Charles, Lloyd, Donald, Olwyn and Helen. When Bill rang Rae and told her that I’d have to go away to hospital, maybe for a year, that dear lady said, ‘Of course, we’d love to have Judy. Our kids will be thrilled.’

At least I could explain to Merle and Dougal that I’d been diagnosed with TB, that I was ill which was why I’d be leaving them. The Depression was over, but we didn’t need the expense of a housekeeper for Bill and the kids. My mother-in-law was adept at inspiring discomfort in her daughters-in-law, and when she heard the bad news, she rang me and sternly instructed, ‘Just wrap a piece of red flannel around your chest and stay home and look after your family.’

I had to try and wean you, but you cried all night and wouldn’t take the bottle. My breasts were killing me, so I had to get up and feed you. How could I have done this to you all ... how would I survive the train trip to Dunedin, and the bus ride to Waipiata TB Sanitarium to stay buried in the mountains for a year before I saw you all again?

When Rae came for you, Merle and Dougal clung to me, but I was ready by then for the train trip with Bill’s sister, Kit. At Dunedin, Kit caught the next train back home and looked after Bill and the kids until they found a housekeeper. It was a day out of Hell for me, and I wept all the way on the bus from Dunedin to Waipiata.

A man with horse and gig met me at the Waipiata bus stop and we jolted away up into the hills in the dark. My breasts were exploding with every bump. At the hospital they showed me to a verandah bedroom, open down one side to the cold June night air and shared with five other women. I was frozen, weeping silently, and desperately needing your father’s warm body wrapped around me. One lady was friendly; she came over to my bed and held out a little packet.

‘Don’t worry dear. You’ll get used to it. Have a cigarette; it’ll make you feel better.’

In 1936, I was desperate to get back to my family, and discharged myself from Waipiata Hospital a month before I was due to leave and was home in time for my 29th birthday and Rae brought you back from Invercargill. I didn’t see your first steps, or hear your first words. You were walking, almost running, by the time I came home. You didn’t know me then. And Merle had started school.’

My mother’s addiction to tobacco began at Waipiata, but she lived until aged eighty-eight, still puffing away on her cigarettes, emphysema notwithstanding. Her doctor didn’t think it mattered at her age, which was all the information Mum needed to withstand her children’s pleas for her to stop smoking.

As I get older I realize more and more how lucky we were to have her for a mother. She was a real survivor.

Merle, Dougal and I went to Sunday School down the road at Brydone. Dougal used to dub me on his bike which, for me, meant sitting on the bar, and hanging onto the handlebars. There was a big hill which we had to walk up. That hill doesn’t look very high nowadays, but it seemed high as a mountain back then. It was pretty scary on the way home biking down the Brydone Hill; my brother enjoyed zooming down it, in and out of the centre white lines. I hung on in terror, with him shouting, ‘Don’t steer! Don’t steer!’

When he was twelve, and climbing in the rafters of the boys’ shelter at school, he fell down and broke his arm. He spent some time in Gore Hospital, with his arm in plaster. Perhaps it was too tight, because his hand started to swell and went almost black. The Doctors wanted to take Dougal’s arm off, but my Mum knew better; she discharged him from Gore Hospital and took him up to Christchurch where Mr and Mrs Cook had retired to from their farm at Rakaia. Mum and Dougal stayed with the Cooks while Mum sorted out a surgeon who saved Dougal’s arm to the combined family’s relief.

She was never satisfied with less than the best for us kids, so we all learned the piano, my elder sister and two little sisters learned Highland dancing, and I learned singing. Mum insisted on boarding school for all of us: my brother was a boarder at Waitaki Boys High School, we four girls were boarders at Timaru Girls High School, and had large weddings when we married.

While my parents’ sea trip to Europe in 1955 introduced them to the pleasures of alcohol, seven months later in California, while on their way back to New Zealand, celebrating reuniting with Dad’s elder brothers after forty years completed their alcohol education. There was no alcohol in the house before their trip, but there was after it.

When Dad retired from farming life he and Mum moved to Gore, where they played golf and bowls to while away the days after my brother took over the farm. Dad was always an early riser; he’d been used to dynamiting tree stumps to get them out of the way on the farm, and when he did the same one morning in Gore at daybreak in their small garden, not surprisingly, the neighbours protested at being woken by this petrifying disturbance to their usual suburban peace and quiet.

With history repeating itself my brother Dougal married Lyn, a lovely city girl from Auckland, who sealed her place in my father’s heart by producing four sons. When the last son was born husbands were allowed by then to see the birth, and my brother, having farmed animals all his life was well acquainted with the miracle of birth and thrilled to witness Alistair being born.

‘But there was only one thing wrong,’ he told us later.

‘What was that, Dougal?’

‘I just couldn’t get Lyn to eat the afterbirth.’

My mother had longed all her married life to go back to Auckland to live, so eventually, they moved up there when Dad was in his early sixties and Mum in her late fifties. We didn’t really know if Auckland rose to her expectations after the initial excitement of meeting all her long lost relations wore off.

Although Jeannette and Des were living in Auckland by then with their three little children, Dad pined for his brothers and sisters in the South Island. He developed Parkinson’s Disease and died on the 30th of April 1975 within twenty days of his seventy-third birthday on 20th May, but Mum lived happily ever after playing bowls and bridge almost until she died aged eighty-eight in December 1995.

My little sister Jeannette, was born on the 7th of April, 1938, and Aunty Rae offered to have me to stay again while Mum was in the maternity hospital. I was three by then and have two memories from that time: one of walking down the long, dark passage to get Uncle Willy’s slippers to put them by the fire each night, and of Aunty Rae having visitors for afternoon tea and the ladies getting up and shaking crumbs off their skirts into the fireplace.

When it was time for me to come home I was put on the bus at Invercargill, thirty miles away, and my big sister Merle was waiting for me when the bus stopped at our farm gate. By then, she was nearly eight and she and Dougal were always going bird-nesting in the pine trees, sneaking off down to the river, climbing up and sliding down the haystacks, or climbing up into the loft above the stable. My coming back home was an impediment to those activities with Mum always yelling at them to look after their little sister.

Climbing up to the loft was fraught with danger. There was a ladder with rungs about twelve inches apart and, of course, my short legs could never stretch that far. But Merle, cleverly inventive child that she was, undaunted at the thought of the ten foot drop between the ground and the loft, hit on the brilliant idea of putting me into a chaff sack, tying a rope around the top of the sack, and then she and Dougal hauled me up after them.

One might wonder now how reliable their knots were, but I was a trusting child and that terrifying mode of transport was probably preferable to staying in the kitchen with Mum. Some of their occupations, such as sliding down haystacks, brought the wrath of our father down on their heads, especially the sight of hay strewn on the ground around a newly formed haystack.

One time when they’d sneaked off down to the river, Dad saw them going there, so he went over and roared like an angry bull while stamping on the ground and shaking the gorse bushes on the river bank. He was satisfyingly rewarded by the sight of their terrified little faces as they scrambled up the bank and over the fence, to run all the way home.

The gorse down at the river was the bane of my father’s existence, and every summer it required severe cutting back to allow access to the river.

I was about five when our bull escaped from the railway paddock. It was terrifying, with him bellowing and charging the cow byre door and us all bailed up behind it, while Mum and Dad did the milking. I don’t recall how that ended, but for me it was the beginning of a lifetime of bull nightmares in dreams and reality.

Sixty years later all my worst fears were realized when our neighbour, Leonie Morkane, while weeding her drive was tossed over a fence, suffered a broken hip, broken ribs, severe bruising and concussion, in a horrifying attack by a cattle beast that had jumped from a passing truck.

It then leaped several fences and ended up grazing in our house paddock. I watched it fearfully until it was tranquilized by the local vet, hoisted up by a crane, and trucked away. I couldn’t suppress the shamefully selfish thought: ‘If it had come up our drive it could have attacked me!’

We were camping up at Hanmer one time with our friends, Trish and Jackson Don, and riding our bikes around the hills, when a huge, horned bull came charging down the hill at me.

From a safe distance, they shouted, ‘Come on Judy! Just ignore it!’ But all my old fears materialized as it hurtled down the road towards me, eyes rolling, strings of saliva swinging from its mouth. Keenly aware of my phobia, my hero raced to the rescue. He whistled and yelled, ‘It’s only a cow!’ But in a panic, I leaped off my bike and jumped over the bank.

I was paralysed with terror as that animal charged across the road. It careered over the bank then thundered down past me, trailing the unmistakable odour of warm milk, to where her calf was grazing down by the river. While I was grateful to my beloved for coming back to rescue me, a few minutes later my bovine tolerance levels were stretched to the limit. Horrifyingly close to the next gate across the road, there were two rampant bulls pawing the ground and roaring at other bulls across the river.

‘Come on dear; don’t look at them,’ Peter yelled. But by then a palsied, gibbering halfwit, I was deaf to persuasion until my hero again bravely herded me to safety. Although I helped with the milking while my brother was away at boarding school, to this day, I cannot walk through a paddock of cows, and bulls haunt my worst nightmares.

As Merle grew older housemaids were less available owing to them being man-powered into jobs that became vacant when the men went off to the war, thus Merle was called upon to help in the house in the weekends. She didn’t enjoy that, but it made the jobs less wearying if she could read a book propped up behind the pantry taps while she was washing the dishes, or vacuum cleaning with a book in one hand and the vacuum cleaner hose in the other.

As previously observed, Merle was amazingly inventive. She found a brilliant, time-saving, new use for the vacuum cleaner: she just took the cleaning brush off the hose, poked the end into Mum’s potty, and it emptied like magic! Mum wasn’t keen on that idea, especially the next time she went to use the vacuum cleaner. That was before we had a flush toilet installed in the old house.

Before I started school I walked across the paddocks with Dad’s morning tea if he was ploughing. When he saw me coming he’d wave, and pull up his team of six draught horses, shouting ‘Whoa! Whoa!’ While he ate his sandwiches he watched the seagulls circling above us, and one day he said, ‘If you put salt on a seagull’s tail, you could catch it.’

Those sharp-eyed, screeching birds whirled above and behind ready to dive on hapless worms as the furrows were turned over. It upset me that first time to see them, sometimes cut in half, struggling to get back into the earth before the seagulls ate them, but Dad said, ‘Don’t worry about them; they grow a new head and a new tail, and turn into two worms.’ After his morning tea one day, he said, ‘Do you want a ride?’

Glancing back at the house to see if Mum was still hanging out the washing, I guiltily ignored her last instructions, ‘Don’t spend all morning down there. I want you back here to set the table for dinner.’ Dad lifted me onto his knee, handed me the reins and explained how important it was to get the rows straight.

‘You know all those silver cups on the mantelpiece that you polish for me? Well, for keeping those rows straight is how I won the cups at ploughing matches.’

They were his cups? I was only four and didn’t know what the writing on them meant; I’d always thought we polished them for Mum.

We bounced along, six plump behinds undulating in front of us, until when we went over a bigger bump I slipped and fell down screaming. Dad grabbed the reins, shouting, ‘Whoa! Whoa!’

The horses stopped, and in a panic he hauled me back up onto his knee to find my gumboot nearly sliced in half, down the front and around the back, but not a mark on my leg. He hugged me to his chest and our tears of fear, relief and laughter, mingled as I looked at my gumboot and said, ‘Mum’s going to be mad with me.’

That little gumboot sat like a grim reminder on a shelf in the wash-house for many years. I wish I still had it, but our Mum was an inveterate discarder of everything that didn’t serve a useful purpose.

Dad belonged to the Masonic Lodge and one Monday night he was getting ready to go to the monthly meeting. He’d grabbed his only good shirt out of the wardrobe and was tucking it into his trousers when he felt something amiss. While holding the offending garment by its collar, he bellowed from the kitchen doorway, ‘What the hell’s happened to my shirt?’

I felt sick with guilt and shame. For some reason Mum had put me in her bed for my afternoon sleep, and I’d relieved myself in her potty; there were no bits of newspaper to wipe my bottom with, nothing except the tail of the nice white shirt hanging in the wardrobe. So what was a girl to do? To add insult to injury, my mother just stood there laughing at my father. He didn’t go to Lodge that night.

A few weeks before my fifth birthday Mum, my little sister Jeannette, and I went up to Auckland to stay with Grandma and Granddad Walker. We hadn’t seen them before, but Mum had told us stories about them and we already loved them. I’d developed a nervous habit of chewing my lips so that the skin all around my mouth was red and rough looking.

‘You won’t be going to Auckland if you keep doing that; Grandma won’t want to see your face in such a mess,’ Mum said.

That must have been warning enough; Jeannette and I were fast asleep on the overnight train from Wellington to Auckland, when I heard Mum say, ‘Wake up girls. I want you to see One Tree Hill.’

I looked up there and saw on top of a volcanic cone a lonely pine tree with the rising sun shining through it. It was a sight I’ll never forget. At home we had a veritable forest of them: two rows spanning half the length of the farm, and great for bird nesting, but what was so special about this twisted old pine tree?

The sight of it tormented New Zealand Maoris who’d have preferred a New Zealand native rather than a European tree. To pacify the Maoris, several totaras were planted but they died, unlike the one lonely pine tree left of the shelter belt. The pine tree was attacked by a Maori activist on the 28th of October 1994 and the 5th of October 2000, and although every effort was made to revive it, the pine didn’t recover. It was finally removed at the threat of being a danger to tourists and ironically the area became known as None Tree Hill.

What excitement met us at Grandma and Grandad Walkers’ place. They looked just like their photographs. They had a few acres in Epsom and big barns of chook houses, eggs and chickens. Uncle Erin, one of Mum’s younger brothers lived there too, and I can remember him sexing the chickens which involved squeezing their bottoms to establish their sex and throwing the little cocks into a big drum of water to drown. Perhaps because of being a farmer’s daughter, I have no recollection of emotion at this sight. Nowadays, as day-old chicks, they go to fattening farms, such as the one Jack and Trish Don had in Christchurch after they retired from their farm down at Waimate, and after six weeks of gluttonous eating, the chickens ended up on people’s dinner plates.

We went to Piha Beach one day with Grandma, Mum, and two of our uncles: Erin and Des. Mum, Grandma and I were sitting up on the beach while the uncles were swimming. Jetty was about seventeen months old and paddling on the edge of the water. Somehow those boys didn’t notice that the tide was dragging her into deeper water until Mum saw what was happening. I can remember her racing down the beach and the pandemonium as they yanked Jetty out of the water, coughing, choking and screaming with fright.

Jeannette probably can’t remember any of these incidents but, to me, they were a memorable part of my childhood and the image of that solitary tree on One Tree Hill is ingrained in my brain forever.

At long last I was five and started school at Mataura in Southland on my birthday, the 12th of October 1939. Not that I can remember much about those first days, except Barbara being born, and getting the middle finger on my right hand jammed in a door of Mr Cameron’s school taxi. To stop the bawling, he gave me a Minty and wrapped his hanky around my finger.

My teacher was Miss Speden who’d been teaching the first year primers at Mataura forever. I can remember how she yelled and beat her knee because Reggie Clearwater always said ‘Chimbly’.

‘Chimney Reggie! Chim-ney! Now say it again!’

‘Chimbly!’ Reggie whimpered, ‘chimbley!’

I thought Reggie was marvellous and didn’t mind when he dragged me around the floor by my ankles in my knitted red woollen dress. When I came home from school I told Mum that Reggie was my boyfriend now.

‘What’s he look like?’ Mum asked.

‘Well, he’s got dirrrrty knees…’ I began, with my Southland accent, but Mum started laughing and I felt affronted and wouldn’t tell her anymore.

Within three days of my first day at school my youngest sister, Barbara, was born on the 15th of October 1939 at the Mataura Nursing Home which was just around the corner from school. I was desperate to see the baby so at lunchtime, with my eager classmates in tow, we turned up outside Mum’s bedroom window. She was horrified but Sister Scott the midwife, laughed; she knew us all from birth and she happily brought Barbara, my new baby sister to the window to show her to the proud instigator and her followers.

Before I started school, Merle biked the three miles up to Mataura and Dougal rode his Shetland pony. But when I started school, Mr Cameron picked us up at the front gate and drove us to school in his Dodge. I couldn’t see out the window so I used to read which made me carsick, so then I had to sit in the front seat with Mr Cameron and my brother. I still couldn’t see out, but I had two eggs for breakfast instead of porridge.

‘I don’t think two eggs for breakfast is a good idea for a little girl,’ said Doctor Woodhouse, but I didn’t get car-sick anymore.

Mum gave me sixpence for lunch when she went to Invercargill one day. I felt rather grand when I bought a fourpenny hot pie at Mr Cameron’s shop and spent the two pennies on an ice-cream and lollies. When I pushed the door open, a little bell rang and I could see the lollies in glass jars behind Mr and Mrs Cameron: jubes, brown aniseed balls, jellybeans, blackballs, minties, liquorice, Wrigleys and Juicy Fruit chewing gum.

‘Make up your mind, I haven’t got all day,’ Mrs Cameron said.

Barbara was the delight of my life. I hung around Mum on her little green chair by the stove, watched the breastfeeding, and helped bath the baby. Mum would sit me down with the precious towel wrapped, Johnson’s Baby Powdered bundle to hold, while she reached up onto the wire shelf above the coal range to get the warmed baby garments.

I deeply coveted the baby’s silk dresses, their lace, tucks and delicate embroidery all hand-sewn by my maiden aunts in Timaru. Mum was fastidious with them, hand washing and ironing them carefully, folding them and laying them out in the Blue Room drawers.

One afternoon in