Three Cedar Trees

By Amanda Giorgis

What happens to the trees happens to the boys....

Three cedar trees grow beside the Applecross homestead in New Zealand’s South Island. Precious trees, carried from Scotland across the world as seedlings. A poignant reminder of home. As they mature, so too do Freddie, the eldest son of Sophia Mackenzie, and Ben and Ed, twin sons of Nancy Lawton.

To Atewhai, the wise old Maori woman, the growth of the saplings into mature trees is matched by the passage of the boys into manhood. Will Sophia and Nancy allow their sons to strike out into the world, or will they hold them back with their roots set firmly in the farm soil?

And, when one of the precious cedar trees is damaged in a storm, does it foretell of tragedy involving one of the boys? Atewhai certainly thinks so......

Join us as our settlers embrace the late 1860s, a period of rapid change in New Zealand. Railways, improved roads and better communications are beginning to open up this remote and spectacular corner of the world to visitors. Some fall in love and find it hard to leave the basin, while others are torn between love and a desire to be involved in this exciting period of progress. Who will stay, and who will leave for ever?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Amanda Giorgis
• Release date: Jul 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005042905

Amanda Giorgis

Amanda Giorgis was born in Somerset, England. She emigrated to New Zealand in 2008 and moved to the beautiful Mackenzie Basin.Amanda writes while looking out onto the flat plains with snow-capped mountains beyond. It is a place where it is easy to find inspiration for stories of early pioneers, who made this unique place their home.She shares her home with her husband, Terry and three rescued huntaway dogs, Nemo, Jess and Ted, some chickens, who are more ornamental than productive, ten acres of wild garden and the dark skies of the Southern Hemisphere.When not writing, Amanda rings church bells and enjoys photography, gardening and finding out about her family history. On lazy days, she gets the knitting needles out.

Book preview

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the resilience and fortitude of the residents of Ohau Village, and especially to my very good friends Nyree and Pieter Schaar, Josh and Emily, Rex the corgi and Whiskers the cat.

In the early hours of Sunday 4th October 2020 a wildfire tore through Ohau Village, a tiny settlement on the very edge of the Mackenzie Basin in New Zealand’s South Island. While some houses remained untouched by the flames, a total of 48 homes and buildings were utterly destroyed. Miraculously, due to a perfectly executed emergency plan, no lives were lost. Nevertheless, many were left with nothing in the world but the clothes they wore in which to escape.

I look forward to seeing this special community rise from the ashes.

Glossary of Māori words and phrases

pou - pole or pillar

tumu - stump

hoa - friend

tamariki - children

mokopuna - grandchild

pounamu - greenstone, jade

toki - necklace resembling an adze, symbol of strength and wisdom

kete - woven bag

oma tere - run fast

tēnā rawa atu koe - thank you very much

e pai ana - you are welcome

korero koe i te reo? - do you speak our language?

iwi - tribe

pākehā - white man, European

whare - dwelling

tīpuna - ancestor, often grandparent

tama - boy, often son

Preface

"

T he three trees growing next to your house are like the three boys, said Atewhai to Sophia. Trees are strong men, rooted in their families and vital for giving light and life to the world."

Over the years, Sophia Mackenzie had tried very hard to understand the old Māori woman’s belief that natural objects had a personality. She could see how you may compare her beloved Freddie and Nancy’s twins Ben and Ed with the three cedar trees. She had watched the trees mature at the same time as the boys were growing up together. But in her view, trees were trees and boys were boys. Atewhai seemed able to consider them as one being. It was very confusing.

It may be time to cut them down and let them go into the world, continued Atewhai. Sophia took the words to mean that the trees should be removed and the boys should go out into the world. Although, perhaps Atewhai meant both together.

When the time comes for Tāne, the prince of trees, to leave his roots behind, then let it be so, do not stand in the way, said Atewhai. "Let him become a pou , which means wooden post. Let him be strong and useful, joining with others to form a handsome structure. Do not let him be left behind as a stump, which we call a tumu , providing nothing but an inconvenience, home only to useless creatures who bore into the rotting flesh."

You are telling me to let Freddie go, aren’t you? said Sophia. To go into the world and do something with his life.

"Indeed I am, hoa , said Atewhai, patting Sophia’s hand with her own gnarled fingers. Indeed I am, my friend."

1. Snowstorm

Applecross, 29th July 1867

Day 1 of the storm

Sophia Mackenzie could hear the next gust of wind rushing across the flat plains towards the homestead. She tensed as she lay in bed, her husband James snoring gently beside her, waiting for the next gust to hit like a slab, rattling the roof, whining like the devil’s dervishes through the cracks in the window frames and sending anything that hadn’t been secured rolling across the yard. She cursed herself for leaving the milking bucket standing by the water trough to dry. Now, not only was it wet again, but it insisted on rolling backwards and forwards in the wind, right under the bedroom window.

She knew only too well that this high plateau, surrounded by tall mountains, was renowned for its harsh climate. It did indeed resemble one of her deep pie dishes, hence the simple name it had acquired of the Basin. It suited the landscape perfectly. It was this geography that forced the wind over the mountains, before sending it racing across the flat land, seeming to gather speed as it went along.

It was not as if she wasn’t familiar with the norwester winds after all these years in the Basin. Yet, she had never got used to the ferocity of the worst of the gusts, never found herself able to sleep through a night time gale and never got rid of the feelings of restlessness that prevented her from settling to anything until the wind stopped blowing. She held a vivid picture in her mind of the day she had seen the metal roof of the outside privy lifted up, peeled from its fixings and thrown many yards away to embed itself in the soft ground. It would have killed any man or beast who got in its way, there was no doubt about that.

Somewhat to her annoyance, James slept peacefully beside her. He had gone to bed early, exhausted by several days of hard labour encouraging the sheep off the hills and into the home paddocks. In between each blast of wind she could hear them now, crowded together, ewes calling for their lambs and the babies bleating for their mothers. Word had gone round the area of snow to come. Only yesterday they had received news of deep snow settling in the valleys to the south. James reckoned he needed to get as much of his flock as he could close to home before it hit and before the swollen rivers made it impossible for men and dogs to cross. Next door at Combe, Edmund had made the decision to leave his sheep to find their own shelter. From past experience the snow was short-lived in this part of the world, and Edmund thought his sheep would find sheltered places to see out the storm. It was, after all, mid-winter and riding out into the hills was a hard job at this time of year, with short days and cold winds. They hadn’t fallen out over it, but James had told Sophia that he thought Edmund was being a bit foolish. After all, what harm was there in a bit of hard work, just in case the weather set in for longer than normal?

The women had been busy preparing for the storm as well. Lucy Cartwright had already moved into Combe with Nancy where she would be more use to everyone than stuck in her little cottage on her own, especially as all teaching at the school had been postponed for now. Sophia had persuaded her father-in-law to spend a few nights with Job and Clara Nicol who lived only a few steps away from James’ cottage, where, often as not, he could be found sitting on the verandah with a book in his lap. It was no hardship for him to have company. Indeed, he and Job Nicol were accustomed to sharing a glass of port and putting the world to right in the comfort of Job’s study. And Clara was more than happy to have someone else to fuss over. They had ample supplies of food and Freddie had been sent across that afternoon to add to their woodpile, stacking some extra in the kitchen and just outside the door where it could be easily reached.

Nobody had been able to find Atewhai, the elderly native woman who Sophia counted as very much part of the family, to see if she was ready to deal with the storm. Not that Sophia was too worried about that, as she knew that Atewhai had an innate sense of self-preservation and would have known that bad weather was on the way long before anyone else. Not being able to travel as much as she used to, Atewhai now lived all year round in the same hut that had been nothing more than a summer dwelling for her and her husband. Sophia had sent Heather up to see if all was well, but the hut was empty. They could only presume that Atewhai had taken herself to a place of shelter to ride out the storm.

Thinking about the time she and Freddie had spent in Atewhai’s hut while James was in prison sent a shiver down Sophia’s spine which had nothing to do with the cold. It had been a dark time, especially as Freddie had been so ill with the scarlet fever for much of the time they were there.

She could stand it no longer. Sleep would not come, not when your head was so full of things, and every time you thought you had fallen asleep, another gust of wind rattled the house to its foundations, causing you to come to with a start. She got out of bed as quietly as she could and tiptoed to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. On the way past the children’s two bedrooms she popped her head round each door and was pleased to see that everyone was fast asleep. There was a bit of life left in the range fire and it wasn’t long before Sophia had it going again using wood from the fresh pile of dry logs stacked by the door, something James had insisted on doing before it got dark so that he didn’t have to go out in the morning. It occurred to Sophia that James was probably right to do so. Snow was coming, she could feel it in her bones, and who would want to struggle outside to fetch wood if it really hit hard overnight?

She snatched the kettle away from the heat just as it began to whistle and filled the teapot. While the tea brewed she tiptoed back into the bedroom to fetch a blanket to put round her knees. Not that it was really cold yet. She knew that would come with the rain. A downpour often followed the wind, rain being a sign that the gales would subside, but this rain would come from the south causing the temperature to fall dramatically. She resigned herself to waiting for the sound of it on the roof. Until then she would sit in her favourite chair, a blanket over her knees and a warm mug of tea in her hands, doing her best to ignore the buffeting wind.

Sophia may well have dozed off at some point because she woke with a start, realising that the wind had dropped a little and the noise she could hear now was rain falling hard onto the roof and dripping from the eaves. She could tell that the wind had turned south westerly too. It was causing the fire to smoke more than usual. Nobody had ever been able to work out why the fire backed up if the wind blew this way, but whatever they tried to do, smoke seemed to seep into the room. Thankfully, it was not a common direction for the wind. By the look of it, dawn was not far away. There was the faintest line of paler sky to the east. It would be light in an hour or so. She would go back to bed now.

She found James just where she had left him, sleeping the sleep of the righteous, undisturbed by the wind or the rain. The temperature had fallen, her feet were frozen, and she regretted throwing the covers to one side when she got out, as her side of the bed was now icy cold. She pulled the bedclothes over her head and curled herself up in a ball, putting her feet as close to James as she dared without waking him up, feeling a tiny bit of warmth radiating from his body. Despite her tiredness, sleep would not come until she warmed up, and while she did her best to stop shivering, she found her mind wandering back through recent events.

It was Guy Pender’s fault. Out of the blue a letter had arrived from him just the day before. Sophia had heard from Dorcas Paget that Guy had gone to Zurich in Switzerland because a relative had died, but she had not at all expected to read that he had fallen in love. If truth be told, Sophia had always assumed that Guy had a preference for men, rather than women. She had often wondered about the rather odd relationship he had with that fellow Frewin, though there had been some kind of falling out, so perhaps it was Frewin who was that way inclined after all. She was somewhat relieved to hear that Guy had found the love of a woman at last, after all, he was such a nice man and so handsome. Not only was he in love, it seemed, but he was due to marry anytime soon. In fact, she calculated that the ceremony may well have taken place already in England. And Guy wrote to say that he was coming back to Applecross with his new wife. Coming back for good! Everyone loved Guy. How could you not do so? He was a charming man, courteous to the ladies and respectful to James and the other men. But most of all, the children adored him, especially Freddie. Though she supposed you could hardly call Freddie a child now he was seventeen. A young man. Her young man, and she was so proud of him despite recent events which only went to prove he was growing up and stretching the boundaries.

She made her mind up to stop thinking about that for now, better to concentrate on the good news that they would be seeing Guy Pender again and meeting his new wife. Her name was Amelie. Sophia rolled that word around in her head. It sounded exotic, foreign. She had to be beautiful with a name like that, and she must be a lovely person or Guy wouldn’t be marrying her.

How long was it since Guy had visited Applecross? At least five years, maybe more. Was it that fateful Christmas when that dreadful man Drummond had so upset Lucy Cartwright by shooting her precious pheasants? The year her brother Samuel had gone off to seek his fortune on the goldfields, returning with a small fortune and a gammy arm which had never really healed. Oh, and of course, it was the year James’ father had turned up unexpectedly. What a blessing that had become! John James would have been no more than a toddler back then. Now look at him, soon to celebrate his eighth birthday, a bruiser of a boy and the spitting image of his father, though his hair had never been quite so flaming ginger. Sophia laughed to herself when she thought of her husband’s fiery red hair. What was left of it these days was more grey than red.

It was her last baby who had inherited James’ hair. Her surprise baby girl, born three years ago now, much to everyone’s amazement. Sophia’s growing belly had not been expected, least of all by her. She had dreaded going through another birth, but Victoria Emily had popped into the world with unexpected ease, making her presence felt with cries loud enough to raise the dead. She knew now that there would be no more babies, she could feel her body changing, and she was thankful for that. Thankful too for the babies she had borne. Freddie, of course, her firstborn, her only child with George before he drowned in the swollen river. These days she thought of James as Freddie’s father most of the time, and it was only now he was growing into a man that Freddie had begun to question that relationship for himself.

And then there was Heather, named for the purple blooms covering the hillsides of Sophia’s childhood home in Scotland. Heather, now twelve, was as tough and resilient as that plant, and just about as impossible to contain. Never one for schoolroom lessons, she was happiest roaming the countryside, often with a sketchbook and pencils. Sophia often wondered how Heather would turn out as an adult. She didn’t want her to be like Lucy, happy in the world of nature, but with no man to love, but she couldn’t imagine any husband taming her wild daughter into a dutiful wife, that was for sure.

With a start, Sophia realised that James had got out of bed and was standing at the window. She turned over, privately enjoying his handsome silhouette against the light outside.

What is it? she asked. Is it still raining?

No, my dear, come and look, replied James, pointing out through the window.

She went to join him, shivering as her bare feet touched the stone cold floor. James wrapped his arms around her to keep her warm, and they stood together surveying the scene. The rain had turned to snow while she had been lying in bed thinking back over the last few years. Snow fell in huge clumps, like the snowballs the children would want to throw at each other later on. It was yet to stay long on the ground, falling onto the wet surface it melted almost immediately, but it wouldn’t take long for it to begin to build up at this rate. Though it looked pretty as a picture, James, with a farmer’s eye, saw it as nothing more than a curse.

Come on, wife, said James, reluctantly removing his arms from around Sophia’s familiar body and tapping her bottom as if he was issuing orders to a recalcitrant child. We all need a hot breakfast before we get to work today.

James and Sophia quickly wriggled into the clothes they had been wearing the day before and set about getting the day started. The range, still going well after Sophia’s efforts overnight, was soon boiling a kettle, heating a pan of porridge and warming a plate of scotch pancakes to be spread with butter and homemade jam. It was not long before the kitchen sounds and smells brought the whole family to the table for breakfast.

James was anxious to get outside and check the animals, so he sat down first with Freddie. Even though they hurried through their food, by the time the two of them were in their heavy oilskin coats, hats pulled down over their eyes and high boots on their feet, the snow had begun to build up against the door. It showed no sign of stopping at all. There was a strange yellow light in the air, a relentlessly grey sky and a muffled silence that comes with snowfall. Even Lucy’s birds seemed to be having a lie in this morning, no dawn chorus, there being very little dawn to cause them to sing.

The other children were keen to leave the warmth of the kitchen too. John James had seen snow before, but for Vicky it was a new experience. Heather planned to set out in the direction of Combe next door to see her friend Adey Rose, but the younger children chattered with great excitement about snow fights and building a snowman. Sophia would not let them out without wrapping up warm, but once they had hats on their heads and scarves around their necks, she was glad to see the back of them for a while so that she could tidy things up and get the bread that had been rising overnight into the oven. They all had instructions to be back for lunch, by which time everyone expected the snow to have stopped falling.

Things, though, do not always turn out as expected! It was almost six days before the snow stopped falling and a great deal had happened at Applecross in the meantime.

2. Disaster

Applecross homestead had grown over the years without much overall planning, responding to each need as it arose. When Sophia and her first husband George built their tiny new home in the valley a short distance upstream from Marytown, it had been just a simple mud cottage thatched in straw, with a single room containing a table, a fireplace and a bed. When James came into Sophia’s life after George drowned, he had encouraged Sophia to move up into the Basin where there was room to expand the farm and to build a much bigger house. Even so, it had begun as a modest structure with an open living space and two bedrooms leading from the main room. Freddie slept in the small room, joined by Heather when she was old enough to leave her cot next to Sophia.

A while later they had constructed a guest room, attached to the main house, but self contained with its own front door, to accommodate the influx of visitors who headed up the valley and over the crest of the hill. Guy Pender had been one such guest, although for much of the time Lucy Cartwright had called it home. These days Lucy had her own little cottage close to Combe Station where, when she wasn’t acting as schoolmistress at the Basin’s schoolroom, she helped Nancy Lawton with her mob of unruly children.

Nowadays, Freddie slept in what had been the guest quarters, with a door knocked through from the main house. He had felt very special and grown up when Sophia suggested he have a room of his own and it hadn’t taken him long at all to fill the room with books, collections of feathers and eggs, an assortment of coloured stones, some photographic equipment given to him by Guy and a jumble of other items which, according to Freddie, were indispensable to a boy of his age. Another two rooms had been added at the other end of the main house as Sophia’s family grew bigger. The effect of this unplanned growth was what looked like a shambling home in several different styles according to the fashion of the time. Half thatched, half metal roof, with stone, brick and wood being used in no particular order for the walls. Sophia had thought for a long time that something must be done about it, but James was busy with the animals and Samuel, who could normally be relied on to help out, not only had his business interests to keep him busy, but now found himself incapable of much manual labour due to his injured arm.

It was a source of some frustration to Sophia. To make matters worse, she had become accustomed to the luxury of an inside bathroom when she stayed at the Pagets’ house in Rhodestown. She dreamed of doing the same at Applecross. No more creeping outside in the cold to respond to nature’s call. James had promised he would look into providing such a facility at Applecross, but it had never happened. She dearly loved her neighbour Nancy, over at Combe, but there was no doubt she was jealous of the home that Edmund had created over the years for his wife and family. They had not one, but two bathrooms, for heaven’s sake. Edmund had extended the Combe homestead too, but in a much more organised fashion and in the full knowledge that his wife intended to produce a positive tribe of children. When the second lot of twins arrived it was obvious that they needed more space, so Edmund planned and built two wings to the existing house, extending forward to form a sheltered and sunny courtyard in the middle. A covered verandah ran around the front of the house giving the perfect place to sit out of the wind and sun while absorbing the view of the plains and the mountains beyond.

When Sophia complained to James about the ramshackle nature of Applecross he had rightly pointed out that Edmund had the advantage of space on either side of the existing home. They were not to know at the time, but the three cedar trees planted so carefully by Sophia to provide shelter from the cruelest of winds, had provided exactly what she wanted, but were now reaching a size that restricted building to that side. They were beautiful specimens, and a poignant reminder of George’s desire to bring something familiar from Scotland to this new land, but James was convinced something would need to be done about them soon. The branches spread out like crinoline skirts, so wide and flat that the children could easily lay across them, and one particular bough had grown dangerously close to Freddie’s bedroom. He could hear it scratching backwards and forwards against the roof on a windy night. James’ offer to remove the worst offender for firewood had been met with horror from Sophia. Not George’s cedar trees! James had been told by Job Nicol that cedar trees were not even natives of Scotland, let alone New Zealand. They grew wild in the Holy Lands, according to Job. James didn’t entirely share his wife’s love for them, although he was sympathetic of her desire to remember her previous husband.

One of the precious seedlings had been planted next to George’s grave and was thriving there, and James considered that was more than enough of a memorial. But no, Sophia would have none of it. George had carefully planted the seedlings from an old tree that grew next to his family’s farmhouse near Applecross in Scotland. He told Sophia that a friend of his father’s, who worked as a gardener on an estate nearby, had given him that first tree when George’s older brother was born, and it had grown big and strong at the same time as he and his brother grew up. The tiny seedlings had all survived, despite being carried half way round the world until George and Sophia found a place to settle. So she was having none of this nonsense about cutting one of them down now. They were far too precious.

There seemed little alternative to demolishing the whole house and starting again a bit further away from the trees, but somehow they never quite got around to deciding what to build instead, and had reached a point where they just made do with what they had. Something, James reckoned, would come along to help them decide, so they may just as well wait for whatever it was to force their hand.

Such a thing could well be the declining nature of James’ father’s health. Sophia often wondered if there was actually a time before James’ father had arrived. He seemed so much part of the furniture these days, and a much loved member of the family. There was no doubt, however, that he was growing frail in his old age. There had been an incident when he forgot about a pan on the range, and it would have caused a fire had it not been for Freddie calling on his grandfather at just the right moment. Then there was his diminishing ability to keep himself clean and tidy. Sophia had always dealt with her father-in-law’s laundry, but she couldn’t be there to dress him each day, nor could she make sure he shaved his whiskers neatly. The little cottage he had called home since his unexpected arrival had given him the independence he desired, but was now beginning to feel just a little bit too far away. James’ father had always suffered from poor vision, and there was no doubt his sight was failing fast. Maybe, Sophia thought, it was time to suggest he moved in with his family where it would be easier for her to look after him. Maybe he could swap with Freddie, who after all would not want to stay at Applecross much longer, though what he was going to do with the rest of his life was anyone’s guess.

As it turned out, something did come along to force their hand into making changes to the homestead. And it came from a most unexpected direction.

The snow continued to fall steadily. Nobody had ever seen the likes of it before and life ground to an eerie and frustrating halt at sheep stations and farms across the whole of the South Island of New Zealand. That first day, as the snow came down in lumps which began to gather together on the ground, everyone expected it to last through the hours of daylight. Then, as had happened many times before, it would turn to rain and be washed away. James and Freddie had been keeping a clear path from the kitchen door to the yard, but as the wintery daylight began to fade they lost the battle