A Change of Air

A Change of Air

by Nora West

KORORĀ PRESS WAIHEKE I SLAND

Copyright 2015 by Nora West All rights reserved First published in New Zealand by Kororā Press 43 Korora Rd, Oneroa, Waiheke Island 1081 www.kororapress.net kororapress@gmail.com ISBN: 978-0-473-33810-7 Cover design by Nora West and Nikki Heuberger Book design by Kelly Bickerton and Copy Expresso Printed and bound in New Zealand by Wickliffe NZ Limited, Auckland Doll’s House by Dinah West Pou by Anjela Thomas Photographs and postcards from the W. A. Laxon and Auckland Harbour Board Collections, NZ Maritime Museum, Auckland www.kororapress.net

For my sister Joan

Contents

Foreword

The Doll’s House 3

PART I PART I PART I PART I ---- Leicester, EnglandLeicester, EnglandLeicester, EnglandLeicester, England

Christmas in Empire Road 15

Creaking at the Seams 33

A Journal and a Letter 52

The Family Scatters 66

PART II PART II PART II PART II ---- Waiheke Island, New ZealandWaiheke Island, New ZealandWaiheke Island, New ZealandWaiheke Island, New Zealand

The Arrival 83

Island Life 95

Carving the Pou 99

War 107

Casualties 113

A Matter of Conscience 115

A Legacy 118

Isabella’s House – A Short Guide 122

Glossary of Maori Words

Acknowledgements

Family Tree

Leicester, England

A & W Palfreyman Ltd

Alfred William m. 1. Isabella

m. 2. Agnes

Three daughters

Robert Teddy m. Alice m. C Toller

Mary b. 1904 d. 1984

Alice John Wills b. 1940

Sarah Sophie

Melbourne, Australia Waiheke Island, New Zealand

Nancy m. Jonty

Wiremu

?

Rewi Cassie Helen

Wiremu b. 1917

m. Genevieve

family moved to NZ 1970

Richard b. 1972

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Foreword

The centenary of the Gallipoli campaign has brought a slew of commemorative histories in all media that celebrate and analyse almost every detail of WWI.

The retelling of events and stories from this historic era with all its heroic sacrifices has captured our imaginations, rekindling old family stories dormant for a hundred years as well as introducing new narratives. This tale plaits a fictional narrative with aspects of my own history.

It is true that a father and daughter in my family left Leicester for New Zealand a hundred years ago, and that the daughter went back to England eight years later, after the father was killed in WWI. Did they land on Waiheke Island? No. That was entirely my own embroidering, as is the doll, and the doll’s house and the carved pou. The story of the making of the mantelpiece is a family anecdote, and the one which inspired all this. I have never seen this carving but I believe it exists in the world somewhere.

Many characters in this story are composites of their descendants, as often happens between generations. The Leicester/Waiheke Island axis does exist. I hope that readers from both ends of the world will empathise with the pains and joys of travelling between two countries as is recounted here. Travel and communications are wonderfully easier these days, and yet distance separates families still. We build bridges to connect two sets of

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families and two different cultures and traditions, and we know the poignancy that this lifestyle brings.

Nora West Waiheke Island 2015

Auckland Ferry Building 1910

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The Doll’s House

April 1984

I am swimming up from a sleep so deep it takes a moment to come back into myself

Now then what time is it?

Birdsong so nearly dawn

lift open the curtain a little

dark still misty.

A great surge of euphoria arises in me. I’ve made it again. These awakenings after long flights or operations or childbirth (and I’ve had a few of all of these in my eighty years) always open me to the glory of it all.

I’m at the end of the earth at the end of my life,

with a few simple tasks ahead that only I can do.

Dear Lord, let this old body hold out and it will,

barring accidents.

I’m very careful these days, nursing the old engine along,

coasting where possible.

I mean to make it all right,

tidy up the doll’s house write a happy ending

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indeed a whole simple narrative,

a children’s book they can sell at the museum,

something to leave behind,

an official history

an expurgated version.

Lord, let us be thankful for the bits history doesn’t relate.

The thin pink line above the hills touches my heart this new morning. Lying in bed luxuriantly, I can already hear someone moving around the old wooden house. How they creak, these New Zealand villas, more like boats than houses, with the air moving under them in waves.

‘How are you, Ma? Sleep well?’ This from my son Wills, my youngest, poking his head around the door with a cup of tea.

‘Like a log, darling. Thank you, just put it there and give me a hug.’

‘It’s only 5.30, Ma, but I’m off now to take the horses across on the early boat. I’ve rung England to tell them you’ve arrived.’

‘See you later then, I’ll just doze a little longer till I hear the family surfacing.’ I gaze through the window, nursing my tea as the first rays light up the hills and the distant city over the sea.

Tuis still going like mad. How old is Wills now? Fifty next year - that’s right, and his wife Genevieve is forty-two. Richard must be twelve then and the twins Sophie and

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Sarah ten; old enough to be useful with the doll’s house repairs and still at an age where they will love it. The age I was in fact when Pa made it for me, that last Christmas before he went away. Wills is getting to look like him now.

My mind slips back… to what an odd and tortured soul my father was, and how he frightened me when he raged and wept about Grandpa, about his Mama Isabella, about regretting taking his precious daughter Mary with him across the world away from everything that was dear to me.

That’s why he made me the doll’s house.

to make it up to me he remade my world in miniature

bless him

with all his love and all the skills

Grandpa lambasted him for wasting time on.

My world in that it was an English house

but in fact it was a copy of his own childhood house,

his mother Isabella’s house.

I never met her

She died when Pa was sixteen.

I can see now he adored her…

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Grandpa William moved the six children into a big house in the centre of Leicester and was remarried within the year to the grandma I knew and loved, Aunt Agnes, the head mistress from Australia with no children of her own.

‘I’ve had two silver weddings with different wives,’ Grandpa used to boast.

Pa taught me all about his early days with that doll’s house. There was a library in Isabella’s house with shelves up to the ceiling and stacks of Blackwood’s magazines. On the voyage out to New Zealand when I was eight, he and I made all the books for the miniature doll’s house version from Passe-Partout wrapped over balsa wood with tiny pictures snipped from newspapers for the front covers. We made Christmas cards from the smallest details of last year’s Christmas cards that were folded in half and pinned above the mantelpiece in the drawing room. From a matchbox we made a sewing box to sit by Isabella’s chair and I lined a pillbox with a bit of blanket for Isabella’s spaniel Jimmy James. We cut out family photos and edged them with gold braid to stick on the walls, with an especially large and ornate oval frame for Isabella.

What a precious treasure that doll’s house was. But Pa went away to war in 1916 and never returned and I went back to England years later without it. They all told me it

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was too big to ship. Before I left, I took the doll’s house with my father’s carvings and tools to the man from the Waiheke Historical Society, Mr. Nelson, who promised me he would display them when he got the museum up and running. I established through many letters that the house was still there but not yet on display.

So this is my project. What have I got here… many bits and pieces, bought and made over the years in 1/12 scale: a woven bookmark for a hall runner, a globe of engraved glass from the top of a trophy, a very expensive set of household lights, from Hamleys, that Pa and I had always wanted. (We had to make do with candle stubs in those days, which gave a good light but were out of scale.)

Here comes Genevieve with another cup of tea.

‘You look bright as a button as ever Mums, did you sleep well?’

‘Of course, dear, I don’t get jet lag. I’ve been thinking about the old days. Now I’ll get dressed and help you with breakfast.’

‘Actually, I’ll leave you and Richard to all that, I have to run the girls in to netball,’ Genevieve is already on her way out of the door.

Good Lord, what are their names again? Never mind, listen out and I’ll hear soon enough. Here comes Richard, gawky and dishevelled as ever, beaming to see his grandmother. Goodness, I thought that Wills looked like my father but Richard is the spitting image. The generations seem to collapse so that I am struggling to

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recall that I am the grandmother of this person, not the daughter.

‘Heavens, you’ve grown Richard dear, give your old granny a hug! Have they taught you to make breakfast yet?’

‘Yes’ he nods, raising his brows and compressing his mouth comically, just like my father, who he never met. Must be genetic.

‘Well I’m starving, get me some eggs on to boil. It’s going to be a wonderful day!’

After breakfast Richard walked with me to the Oneroa bus stop where we caught the old bus to the museum. The painted wooden sign swung bravely in the morning sun proclaiming The Waiheke Island Historical Society.

This was no formal museum, but a cluster of local wooden buildings, re-sited and now standing in cheerful gardens, with chickens pecking through the grass just as I remembered from all those years ago. There were three cottages, all furnished from the period and a large main woolshed with a shop and various displays. Richard opened up, set the New Zealand flag fluttering from the gatepost and showed me through all the buildings with pride. He told me he was the youngest member of the society and that now he was twelve he was able to take his

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shifts running the place. The museum was open Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays from 10 am to 4 pm.

Together, we solemnly read Mr. Nelson’s brass plaque, installed next to a framed photo of him above the desk.

‘He’s buried in the cemetery next door,’ said Richard, ‘and there’s a wooden seat for him.’

‘We’ll take him some flowers later,’ I told him, ‘but now, let’s look at the doll’s house!’

So up the rough open stairs we went, picking our way past piles of papers and boxes, on their way up and down. Richard unlocked the door at the top and stood aside to let me through.

Mr. Nelson had been as good as his word. The doll’s house was at the back, on a table, covered in old blankets. As we carefully lifted them off the house my heart pumped within me so violently I thought I might faint. My whole life is enshrined here, I thought as I sank onto the chair Richard hastily put under me. I leaned forward to put my hands on the packing case walls, shut my eyes and just rocked the house gently in a long reconnecting hug. It evoked my father, my English childhood, my painful and brilliant New Zealand adolescence. They had all been so long buried and yet were safely stored up for this very late reunion.

‘Oh thank you Mr. Nelson,’ I whispered, as tears made their way down my old cheeks. But I soon recovered with Richard’s arm around my shoulders, and a glass of water,

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so that we could talk of the restoration and look through all the pieces I had brought over in my suitcase to install.

The poor old house was very damaged and derelict. Water had got in and ruined the plywood walls so that the roof tiles, made of cardboard cases from the family flour mill, sagged woefully. But my father’s hand sawn wooden joists and frame stood true and the carved balustrades and staircase only needed a good oil and polish. Not by me any longer, I thought. My eyes and my hands are not up to it. Now it was the very project for the boy. Richard’s knowledge of English domestic history and his dexterous modelling skills impressed me and I made a private note to myself to provide for his further education in my will.

‘I can work on it during my shifts!’ Richard exclaimed excitedly. ‘But we’ll have to move it downstairs so I can man the place as well. It will be very interesting for visitors to watch.’

‘And you’ll probably get some offers of help,’ I said. ‘That’s a very good plan. Who do we have to ask?’

‘There’s a meeting of the Museum Society on Friday that we must attend.’

And so we did. I was introduced to three ladies my own age, none of whom I remembered, also a historian in his sixties and a lively young woman who had worked in a Sydney museum. She was the one who swung the vote for displaying an unfinished artefact (work in progress they called it). She was keen on my proposal to publish a guide

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and history too. There was unanimous agreement when I added that it would be at my own expense.

‘Money’s no object now, boy,’ I told Richard when he came up with more items required to finish the job. But, in fact, it was all ridiculously economical.

We fell into a pattern over the next month of working in the woolshed every day, Richard leaning stooped over the house or painting bits out on the veranda, while I tapped out the words of the doll’s house guidebook on a wonderful old Remington on a desk by the rear window. I could look up at Maori Hill for inspiration and memory and over to Richard for technical descriptions of construction.

Sometimes my old brain falters as I type … and the times swim together - England and New Zealand, Teddy and Richard, Isabella’s house and this loving replica, built by her son, restored by her great grandson and now recorded by me.

I have recent photos of the real house, its interior and exterior, to add to the text, taken for a Country Life article and lots of old family studies - of William and Isabella on their wedding day, of Teddy, of my Mama Alice and me aged seven (just before Alice ran away), of Nancy, Jonty, of me and the family on a picnic at Onetangi beach in 1916

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(just after we’d had the news Pa had died). And of course a recent family group of my son Wills’ strong cheerful New Zealand family, with Richard in the middle and me, a brisk little person by their side.

There are packets of old letters too, posted across the world and saved by Agnes and Nancy. And here is a picture of St Martins, Empire Road, Leicester, the house I still remember so vividly.

When I was a child alone in New Zealand, I would soothe myself to sleep by mentally walking the old corridors of that house, opening doors into all the rooms till I reached the nursery window seat where I liked to curl up and go to sleep.

Part I

Leicester, England

Leicester, Museum and New Walk

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Christmas in Empire Road

December 1912

A black and white world, bare trees, all sounds muffled by the thin coating of snow. Few walkers on the pavements, and those wrapped against the bitter wet wind carrying their last-minute Christmas parcels home at a brisk clip before the weak daylight faded. Only the house windows shone, gaslight yellow, all along the terraced streets, the warm parlours within glowing through the paper snowflakes stuck onto the panes.

St Martin’s, William and Agnes’ house was not in a terrace. It stood aloof on the best street in Leicester, Empire Road. On these bitter December days the carriages rumbled onto the gravel drive, stopped to deposit the visitors and went on up to the back door for the coachmen to chat over a dram in the kitchen. No street numbers here. The postman delivered twice a day through the polished brass letterboxes in the shiny black front doors, with the house names carved in their white stone lintels.

It was a stern old brick Victorian residence: a wide hall and two receptions on the ground floor, six bedrooms and the nursery on the first floor and four bedrooms in the attic for staff who spent most of their days in the basement kitchen. The dark cold hall, smelling of roast veal and cigars, had a black and white tessellated tiled floor that was sprinkled in snow that week and trampled by many feet,

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for this was the centre of operations, as usual, for the Palfreyman family Christmas.

Upstairs in the nursery Agnes presided, a large woman, handsome, calm and exceedingly capable. She and her sister Nancy were from Melbourne, raised by a wealthy and liberal father who believed in education for women. Both girls were rich, clever and radical. Agnes took the academic route; a teaching career whose pinnacle was the position of headmistress at Cheltenham Ladies College. She became a legend in that institution after she met and married widower William, and took on the care of his large family. Nancy, six years younger and always wilder, had made an impetuous and early marriage to a sheep musterer from New Zealand.

Agnes stood now in the nursery, gazing absently at the bare branches of the beeches, dancing in the wind. She was calculating numbers for Sunday lunch, Monday’s Christmas feast and Tuesday Boxing Day. The centre table was full of wrapping paraphernalia and the window seat piled with wrapped parcels.

William’s eldest children, long married, would just call in over the three days, but daughter Patti’s three youngest, aged four, two and one, would be staying with the nursemaid and possibly, her husband Arnold if his ship berthed in time. Agnes worked through the numbers. So at least five extra for Sunday then and twelve extra for Christmas Day, three of them children, but all old enough this year to sit up to table. She must remind Clara to put

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three silver sixpences in the Christmas pudding, which was to be mixed that evening.

She took an old envelope from the writing desk, sat down and listed presents, in pencil, in her rounded teacher’s script.

Grace and Jessie … 1pr heather mixture stockings each + 1 guinea

Sam … 1 pair hand knit socks + 1 crown

Clara …

Agnes wrote on, with the ease of ten years’ practice. Departures from routine were frowned upon by William and anyway risked upsets. Agnes ran this household like her English boarding school. She aimed for a calm progress always and this week, through the choppy seas of the holiday, she was alert to submerged dangers and sudden mood shifts as the family ate and drank unaccustomed amounts, the children erupted and broke things and the kitchen staff strained to sustain the delivery of all that food. This was why she always gave the staff their presents in the kitchen after breakfast on Christmas morning. Boxing Day was for parcelling out the spare food for the servants to take home to their families, leaving the big house with a fend-for-yourself atmosphere that was Agnes’ favourite state.

The big Christmas tree stood proudly in the entrance hall and the mistletoe, gathered from the spinney by her stepson Robert, hung above the front door. A hundred or so Christmas cards proclaimed the general love and good

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wishes of the neighbourhood and the Yule log lay unlit, waiting on the hearth. The sleigh and six reindeer centrepiece made of curled paper by Robert’s brother, Teddy, was the one new decoration this year. It was a small miracle of crisp twists and shadows, so deftly conjured that Agnes smiled, remembering her own happy childhood Christmases in Australia. She stiffened slightly on imagining the words William and Teddy could have over the centrepiece as the drink took hold.

The table was already set with the Minton china, white with gold rim. Clara had folded the napkins yesterday with Teddy’s daughter Mary, who chose the slipper design from Mrs. Beaton’s Guide to Household Management. These little shoes were lined up on a tray in the scullery for Mary to fill with bread rolls and place by each setting on Christmas morning.

Robert’s sons Dennis and John had lettered the place names and put them on each dinner plate. John had wanted to draw holly on each one but Dennis refused to let him mess them up. Agnes had helped John carefully place the tall red candles into the silver candlesticks wrapped around with holly. The presents were crowded together under the tree, to be opened after church and before lunch at Grandpa’s, accompanied by sherry, lemonade and mince pies. The big box from Agnes’ sister, Nancy in New Zealand, delivered by carter the previous week, was the most intriguing: a rough crate, tightly roped, covered in labels and chalked scrawls. It was always opened first.

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Clara’s head appeared around the nursery door.

‘Supper’s on the table in the breakfast room, Ma’am,’ she said, meaningfully. Agnes rose quickly, put her list under a book and came out.

‘Thank you Clara,’ she whispered conspiratorially. They walked downstairs together, actors leaving the dressing room silently. Clara opened the breakfast room door and Agnes sailed through, back in role, to pacify William and negotiate another happy evening.

‘Where is everybody?’ William was standing, tall and bulky, by the long window overlooking the drive, sherry in hand, impatient for company. His large head gleamed in the gaslight, entirely bald though balanced by the huge ginger and white eyebrows and whiskers. In his youth he had been a county cricketer and even at sixty-five, with a paunch under his waistcoat, he moved with an easy power.

‘What’ll you have to drink?’ he asked Agnes.

‘A small sherry, dear, thanks. And Robert is calling in soon, but he will have eaten. It’s just us this evening!’

Agnes smiled at him fondly. She sat and gestured to his place in the big chair and asked, ‘How was your day?”

‘Damned annoying as it happens.’

William set down their glasses and resumed his seat. He had a long tale of ignorant railway officials and lost sacks of grain. He unburdened himself as she filled his plate with pork pie, pickles and butter and cut the new, crusty, white loaf. Agnes murmured in sympathy, and told

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him a similar anecdote about the postmistress and the delivery of the New Zealand Christmas box.

The exchange of gifts between Agnes and her beloved younger sister Nancy was an annual project that began both in Leicester and New Zealand the July before Christmas, with copious planning, purchasing, saving of periodicals and soliciting of gifts from the rest of the family. These had to be ingeniously packed, small inside larger items, breakables wrapped in soft materials and all in time for the carter to take them to be shipped at the end of August.

Nancy was always more adventurous. She had married at eighteen against her father’s wishes. His name was Jonty, a handsome New Zealand Rhodes scholar Nancy met at an Oxford May ball she had attended with Agnes. Now they were raising two daughters on the family farm on an island off the coast of Auckland. The sisters corresponded all year, their news and enquiries crossing in the post, but only their annual Christmas boxes could carry items larger than an envelope could hold.

This year William had wrapped for Nancy an orchid tuber in peat moss and linen inside an old galosh, destined to bloom in New Zealand.

‘What has Robert sent?’ he now asked, as he peeled an apple in one long spiral with his pocket knife. Before Agnes could reply, there was a flurry of noise in the hall and Robert himself appeared, large, cheerful and rosy, his

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arms opened wide to include them in his festive high spirits.

‘Good to see you, my boy,’ said William. ‘What are you drinking? And what did you put in the box for New Zealand? I was just asking Agnes.’

‘Small scotch, Pa, and notes on Mendel’s Genetics,’ Robert said over his shoulder as he hugged Agnes.

‘Some book you found at Cambridge, reading Agriculture, I suppose?’ his father enquired.

‘Not quite a book, not published yet, it’s his course notes. But yes, that’s where I heard of the theory. And Jonty’s best placed to develop the plant breeding ideas. In Auckland’s climate he can raise three crops of peas a year.’

‘Have you eaten dear?’ asked Agnes. When he smiled yes she left them to pursue the topic while she ate her own piece of pie and perused the report of the latest women’s suffrage demonstration in the Leicester Mercury. She had read through the booklet before wrapping it, but chose not to share her opinion. She doubted that Jonty’s farming practices were up to that level of experimentation. It was his sporting prowess that had gained him his place at Oxford, where his views remained conservative throughout his time there.

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On Christmas morning, Mary woke up at home in Avenue Road to feel the weight of the stocking on her ankles. It crackled as she struggled excitedly to sit up. She flicked the curtain back behind her bed head. Still dark outside, but she could see by her pink light that the old beige lisle stocking at her feet was bulging with lumpy shapes. A cracker was poking out of the top, shining gold and scarlet in the lamplight. Minty, the ginger tom, drawn by the sound of the wrappings, leapt on to the end of the bed and after a short investigation began to wash himself sedately. Mary slipped on her dressing gown and slippers, ran down the landing to use the freezing bathroom, then rushed back to leap into her warm bed and open the first package. Perfect happiness, she thought.

At breakfast she could sense her parents weren’t happy, although they opened her presents with joyful reverence, as usual. Mary worshipped them both and knew they loved her very much. Her father, Teddy, really liked the calendar she had made him, with a collage of pictures of things he loved: his old home, Michelangelo and peonies in a vase. And her mother, Alice, so radiant this morning, clapped her hands in delight at the autograph book, on the first page of which Mary had inscribed a poem about mothers.

Alice had made Mary an album, inscribed in her beautiful copperplate, full of postcards from the museum where she volunteered as a guide and curator. The album had pictures and stories about many of the exhibits Mary knew so well from her frequent visits. She had learnt much of her history and geography from the Leicester Museum

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and Art Gallery. All those vases, statues and frescoes at the museum were old friends to Mary because she had seen them first with her parents.

Teddy had made his gift for her himself too and presented it with his funny rueful smile, eyebrows up, chin out, never quite sure that anything he made would be welcomed after years of jeers from his father, William. It was a toy theatre, with velvet curtains, six figures moved by sticks and a carved proscenium arch. Mary had adored these toys at Pollocks’ Toy Theatre shop on a visit to London earlier that year.

They ate little so as to leave room for the great feast at St Martin’s. In the bustle to get ready everything seemed like an ordinary Christmas to Mary. She paused in her room, collecting her gifts and stared again through the little four-paned window with its view of the icy lane and the leafless beech tree. She could see the smoke from her grandparents’ chimney curling up into the pale blue morning and she made a wish: Please may I be seven for ever and ever and ever.

When she came back down she was surprised to learn that her mother had already left on foot for church. She could tell her father was preoccupied, but he smiled when he saw her.

‘Twentyman’s outside; he wants some exercise too,’ he said.

Grabbing her coat, Mary ran outside to greet the big bay hunter, waiting at the mounting block with his reins

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tied to the railings. She stroked his velvety nose, climbed the steps and hopped up onto his friendly back, in front of the saddle. Her father swung up behind her and they rode, his arm around her, at a stately trot along the empty roads towards the Great Meeting House in Tavistock Square.

The church was full for Christmas morning and Mary slipped into her usual spot in the family pew, relieved to find her mother already there. Alice squeezed her hand as they launched into the old carols, only letting go when they knelt to pray. Afterwards though, during the sermon, Mary noticed that Alice appeared to have forgotten her daughter was beside her.

It was an old joke between them how boring the sermons were, but today Alice was staring straight ahead instead of catching Mary’s eye. She seemed to be listening intently to some distant music while a small red flush coloured her cheeks. Mary looked around discreetly, noting the hats and the needlepoint pictures on the hassocks. The brass plaque to her dead grandmother Isabella still shone as gently as ever on the wall:

Dear Grandma, Look after us always

and I promise to take care of Pa for you.

She looked back at her father, sitting with his head in his hands though it was not time for prayers and a strange cold feeling welled up in her chest. On the way to St Martin’s they paused at the bend in the lane to regard Isabella’s house, where her father and his siblings had been

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brought up, pale in the winter sun. From this distance it was as neat and perfect as a doll’s house.

‘Which was your room Pa?’

Her father loved telling her these stories. He pointed out to her again which rooms they had all slept in and the drainpipe outside the window of the room he and his younger brother had shared. They had shinned down it on various illegal early morning expeditions, but could never get back up again. They had to knock on the kitchen window to get Grace to let them in secretly when she was lighting the range. Then they would slip back up the back stairs with a piece of cold pie and an apple each and read in bed till breakfast time.

‘Let’s wish her a happy Christmas,’ Pa said. Then he raised his right arm out straight before him, palm towards the house, a Roman salutation. Mary did the same.

‘Happy Christmas Isabella!’ they called out, their breaths clouding in the crisp air.

Then Teddy gripped her fiercely, wheeled the horse around and set them cantering towards St Martin’s and the family feast day ahead.

Twelve people had assembled with William and Agnes after church on Christmas morning. The presents awaited

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them all in the drawing room. The adults were in high spirits and all the children in a fever of excitement waiting for the gifting to begin. Sherry and lemonade were passed around, a tray of mince pies appeared and Mary was chosen to be the one to deliver the parcels from the tree to all the family. First came the contents of the box from New Zealand: postcards, oranges and macadamia nuts for all the children and an intricately carved walking stick for William. Nancy had knitted a lambswool shawl for her sister Agnes, wrapped in old tissue paper dress patterns, to which was pinned a long letter narrating the year’s news.

There was a strange wooden carved Maori figure for Teddy, pierced through and stylised almost beyond interpretation.

‘Neither use nor ornament,’ pronounced William, spoiling for a fight.

But Teddy just smiled absently and let the barb slide over him, wrapping the object back up carefully and leaning it against a wall out in the front hall. Mary steered past this hidden reef by presenting her mother’s gift from Jonty, a pair of lambskin slippers that Alice clutched to her heart in delight, like two teddy bears.

More and more parcels were drawn from beneath the tree and unwrapped to reveal their contents. Excited and impatient, other children joined in the delivery until Agnes took over firmly, restoring order before a child wailed or William bellowed.

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‘Lunch is served,’ came the call, upon which the assembly left the chaos of paper and toys all over the floor and lined up to be seated at the grand dining table, visible through the double drawing room doors.

Teddy regarded his family as William said grace. Everyone else had their eyes obediently cast down to the table. What sheep, he thought. They don’t believe all this guff any more than I do, but they know which side their bread is buttered. Pa doesn’t hold any being greater than himself, but he does love tradition and holding forth as head of the family. No unconditional love from Pater. He demands total obedience, under threat of disinheritance, as his father did before him.

Teddy recalled the terrible days after his mother Isabella died, when he was seventeen. His father had shut himself in his study with the whisky and left all the funeral arrangements to the older children. After William had read Isabella’s will, with the bequest for Teddy’s art school fees, he had flown into a frightful rage and summoned his lawyer to pronounce it inadequately drafted and therefore null and void. Teddy had only learned of his mother’s true intentions some four years later, on his twenty-first birthday, by which time he had lost any ambition to carve out an artistic career. He regarded his mother more and his father even less following this discovery.

‘Amen,’ intoned his father and Teddy’s thoughts snapped back to the present.

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The table’s paper centrepiece of reindeer and sleigh won general praise and admiration. Agnes forestalled any adverse comments by thanking Teddy for making it for her.

‘You are so clever, Pa,’ said Mary, ‘I love their curly horns.’

‘Antlers,’ said William fondly correcting his granddaughter, as he began to carve the enormous turkey. ‘Drat it, I could do better if I had a decent knife.’ And he proceeded to give the carving knife a few dramatic strops on the whetstone before carving perfect slices all along the shiny, brown, steaming breast meat, loading them onto plates. Clara served them to each person around the table. As the vegetables and sauces passed from hand to hand William raised his glass for a festive toast.

‘Here’s to peace and prosperity in the coming year!’

However, William was not as sanguine as he appeared, for the news in the papers was full of brewing hostilities in the Balkans and he had two sons of an age to serve their country. He had no time for the jingoism that glorified war and no intention of losing his boys to its idiotic patriotism. William could keep one son back to run the mill, but not two, and young Robert was reckless and gallant. William was already turning over some possible strategies in his mind.

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Agnes waited to give William his present till they were alone again after the big family luncheon was over and all had departed for their own homes. She had shrewdly purchased him a Kodak Box Brownie camera, complete with instruction book and roll of film. He was as pleased as Punch with it, read all the instructions reverently and got Agnes to install the film. He could scarcely wait for daylight to try it out. So on Boxing Day, when all the servants and house staff were off duty for their annual holiday, William and Agnes called on Alice, Mary and Teddy for a picnic lunch at Avenue Road.

‘Now,’ said William, importantly to his captivated audience, ‘this is the camera of the future! No more tripods. It is a brand new hand-held Kodak Box Brownie, with 100 shots inside all ready to go! You point and press, we do the rest. It says so here. The film comes in rolls which must be sent off to Harrow for processing. We need some more family photos and you don’t need to be an artist to use this machine!’

Teddy was surprised and charmed by his father’s enthusiasm. Maybe the old goat was actually jealous of hobbyists? He brought out his own old plate camera and set it up with its heavy tripod in the garden, keen to share his knowledge.

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‘It uses dry plates now, Sir, and I can get them developed in Leicester. Much larger and better definition for eight-by-ten prints suitable for framing. But the Box Brownie is marvellous for informal snapshots because it’s so portable. Ideal for picnics and the seaside,’ he explained kindly.

Mary was delighted too. ‘Can you take a picture of Barker, Grandpa?’

So a chair was brought out onto the chilly lawn for Mary to sit on, and Barker was persuaded to lean winningly against it, as only a Jack Russell can do. Alice insisted on Mary putting on another pinny and brushing her hair, and then posed with her daughter.

William took several photos of Agnes and Teddy and the family too. He even let Mary take some of all the grownups (and these were the ones that turned out best when years later the prints eventually returned from New Zealand after the First World War). After that, Agnes and Alice laid out the food and they all sat down to cold pie with bread and cheese.

After lunch, William took Teddy off for a walk around the empty cold city streets. The old man had guessed all was not well with his son and Alice, and suspected a liaison on her part. He thought that girl had always been dangerously beautiful and headstrong with it. No question that a change of air would be beneficial for them all.

‘You’ve worked hard for the mill these last ten years, my boy,’ he said out loud. ‘Do you all good to have a

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change of air. How about the three of you go on a cruise next year, via Cape Town and Melbourne to New Zealand where you can stay with Nancy and Jonty. What d’you say? Humph?

‘It will all do wonders for Mary’s education and you can bring back albums of photographs to show us all back here. And while you’re out there, you can get some introductions from Jonty to some good grain merchants to show them that new winnowing gadget you’ve invented for our mill. With any luck you’ll make enough profit introducing those to New Zealand to cover the cost of the trip.’

William felt there was no need to mention his fear of Robert enlisting in the imminent war. Or that this generous offer would assuage his secret discomfort over ignoring Isabella’s wishes for Teddy’s education. Travel would be much more use than an art school training, in his considered opinion.

But Teddy was aghast, also affronted to be so suddenly redundant after all those years of being told how essential he was to the business.

‘How will you manage, Sir?’

‘Oh - I’m still perfectly able to keep an eye on things. Mrs. Higgs runs the office and young Robert can take his turn at the wheel now he’s finished at Cambridge.’

So Teddy could only agree to this amazing change in his fortunes. He hoped it might even cause Alice to snap out of her petulant self and enjoy being with him again.

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Maybe it was his working at the mill that made him so dull and her so impatient with him? They might have a rich and loving future ahead together after all ... and as for Mary! How she would delight in all these marvels. For all his belligerence, the old man had a good heart, thought Teddy, embracing him with genuine affection. He knew they both missed Isabella and that Teddy’s likeness to her was the underlying and unstated cause of William’s harshness to her favourite son.

But Alice, who had spent an awkward hour with her mother-in-law fielding questions as to her general health and happiness, almost lost her composure at the prospect of a year away with Mary and Teddy. She expressed amazement, demanded that Mary not be informed yet, and privately determined to arrange a meeting with her lover Charles at the museum on her very next rostered shift there. This development may well force him to choose between his dull wife Betty and her beautiful self. Her heart pulsed wildly at the thought as she and Mary dried the plates and stacked them in the scullery.

Something’s up, said Mary sadly to herself.

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Creaking at the Seams

February 1913

A few weeks later, on an early February morning, Alice sat in her sewing room at 34 Avenue Road, Leicester making a doll for Mary’s birthday. A tumble of fabric scraps spilled out onto the Turkey carpet from the old canvas kitbag some army uncle had brought back from the Boer war. The kitbag contained two generations’ worth of snippets from dresses and curtains, shirts and nightgowns. It was only too easy to be waylaid in memories of their stories, conjured up through their old fashioned patterns.

Every piece reminded her of a garment some woman in her family had made or worn in her past. These textiles formed a patchwork of the Palfreyman identity: solid, reassuring, enviable. She felt a deep qualm at the prospect of abandoning that solid community for a wild outsider life of passion, so deep that she nearly lost her nerve. But she kept to the task at hand, and sorted resolutely through the pieces. She was looking for enough heavy weave cream twill to make an 18 inch body, also some fine satin, velvet, or poplin for the dress and white lawn and lace for the undergarments.

Alice had come to her room in a fluster following the rebuke she read in Agnes’ sharp glance towards her across the ballroom the previous night at the annual Hunt Ball. She needed to calm down by doing something domestic. Burying her nose in some fine old lavender-scented lace,

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Alice felt her heart relax. Certainly she was the very picture of a good mother, beyond reproach, sewing and ironing in her little room. Perhaps she had misinterpreted the look from Agnes. Surely she could not have any idea of her pact with Charles?

His note was now a tiny pile of ash in the small grate, where the coals glowed calmly. Its instructions were burnt into her brain, as was the memory of his voice in the dark, begging her to find the courage to elope with him and of his lips on her bare shoulder as she shivered in the dark, in her ball gown, outside the Assembly Rooms.

Their flirting over the past six months became, during one swooning half-hour outside on the balcony, a serious commitment to discard their respective spouses. The trigger for Charles was Alice’s news of the proposed year away to New Zealand which caused him to impulsively and tipsily beg her to elope with him. A gentleman could never rescind such a plea the morning after, so all that remained to do were the practical steps for their departure: the packing, the letters, the doll for Mary’s birthday, all to be conducted in total secrecy while Charles saw to the tickets and hotel bookings for France.

The four-paned window looked down onto the gravel drive and she frequently glanced through it watching for visitors; silly Teddy, or his old father William, or, much more thrillingly, Charles himself. The thought of him made her check her reflection in the little mirror she had hung on the window frame, where the light was best.

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Yes, her skin was as dewy as ever, her pale curls as tousled and her eyes as blue. Alice practised looking up through her eyelashes to check their allure.

‘Now, Alice,’ she told herself severely, ‘this will never do!’

She ironed some cream pieces and cut two legs, using the old doll Lily that her own mother had made her as a pattern for the length. Alice never bothered with paper patterns, as she rarely made the same piece twice. She had her own definite ideas about doll construction; particularly proper feet you could put shoes on, which required tiny soles, not like the stumps bound with wool her own doll Lily had. Also the head; this doll would have a proper round one, good for bonnets, rather than Lily’s flat round dish of a head that flopped and made the doll resemble a dead baby. No, this doll for her own daughter would have a wooden spoon sewn into the body before stuffing, so that she would sit regally upright.

This doll would need a lot of backbone to set an example to Mary. Her own mother had reared more children and enjoyed far less spare time, so it was a wonder that she had found the time to make Alice her own doll at all. Yet, for a moment, she noticed again how carefully her mother had embroidered Lily’s face:::: the eyebrows were drawn in a perfect brown satin stitch and the top eyelashes were separate black stitches that gave her green eyes a startled air. Why had her mother chosen green?

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It had to be said that old Lily had lasted all of Alice’s life, a constant like her mother, whereas poor Mary’s future would be less certain. She hoped her daughter would be glad of this new doll to talk to while Alice was away. She regretted the need to leave her only child behind. But then Mary was such a homebody, so involved in her ponies and her schoolwork, that it really was the kindest thing to do. And, of course, Mary had never liked Charles and would surely be nothing but a misery on their travels in their new life together.

The porcelain shepherdess sat prettily on the windowsill,,,, her first gift from Teddy, who took her to visit the Minton potteries early on in their courtship and bought it for her.

‘She reminds me of you!’ he had told her shyly.

Alice had never heard of porcelain or Minton in those days and was properly impressed by the compliment. She had grown up the eldest of five in a struggling household; her ill father on a railway pension and her mother Marjory, never a beauty, worn down with childbearing. Not surprising then that Alice saw babies as an obstacle to her ascent of the social ladder. She had used her looks and good schooling to acquire a position at the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery shop. With her innate affinity for beautiful objects she learnt fast, dressing with real flair on a tiny budget. Teddy was a frequent solitary visitor to the ecclesiastical carving displays and had fallen quickly for the stylish and witty museum guide.

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Outside, the wind lashed the bare trees against each other along the drive. Not a single footfall, of horse or person, all morning. Minty had been curled up on the window seat for hours. Alice was perfectly safe and warm up here; too safe actually, too warm, stuck, like Rapunzel in her tower. She felt a surge of excitement at the prospect of her dangerous assignation, but bent again to focus on the tricky business of the head piecing. She sewed the segments together on the old Singer treadle machine, wound the handle and reversed the shape to work on the other side. Looking good, she thought with satisfaction and leaving her work on the little table, she ran down to the kitchen for a wooden spoon.

Outside the kitchen door she paused at the sound of voices. It was Gladys, their cook, but Alice could not quite make out the other woman’s voice. But she heard her own name clearly; they were discussing her! The nerve of it! She opened the door imperiously and swept in.

‘May I have a wooden spoon...’ she began and then faltered. The other woman was Betty Toller, Charles’ wife, and loyal Gladys was clearly taken aback at their both being in her kitchen at the same time.

Alice quickly recovered and cried, ‘Why, Mrs. Toller! What a surprise!’ extending her hand charmingly. ‘Whatever are you doing in the kitchen? Will you come up for a cup of tea?’

She noticed that Betty Toller looked uncomfortable, but then Gladys came forward to the rescue. Dear Gladys!

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She’s more than equal to the niceties of such an unexpected social dilemma, Alice thought, although clearly a little unnerved by it occurring in her kitchen.

‘Mrs. Toller came to ask me if I could make her sister’s wedding cake and I told her I really don’t have the time. In fact…’ she bustled forward with a wooden spoon ‘here’s the spoon, Mrs. Alice and if you don’t mind, I have two cakes in the oven I need to look at.’

‘Of course, Gladys, and thank you,’ said Alice as she turned to Betty. ‘We should let her get on,’ and she gently pulled on the arm of her lover’s wife to guide her through the kitchen door.

‘She looked as if she wanted to smack my hand with it,’ she said to Betty, gaily. ‘It’s for the doll I’m making for Mary’s birthday gift; I do so hate dolls with floppy heads, don’t you?’

But poor Betty found herself quite unequal to any further conversation with the woman who had been distracting her Charles and fled, making her excuses, out of the front door this time, regretting her temerity in seeking information on Alice from the family cook.

As for Alice, she retreated to the safety of her sewing room and sewed assiduously for the rest of the afternoon so that by teatime a newly fledged doll sat resplendent, formidably upright on the window seat just awaiting her features to be completed. She wore a duck egg blue satin dress with matching knickers and gazed serenely down the drive, her cream linen face, for now, an inscrutable blank.

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The last stall on the left in the stable yard at Avenue Road was used by Teddy for woodcarving. Small and dark, it smelt of cigars and horses, but Teddy always kept it swept and orderly with the tools hung up above a large bench. His mother’s mantel clock ticked steadily, chiming on the half hour, with a tremendous gong on the hour. He wound it on Sundays without fail.

Today, Teddy was in his silent rage, the worst sort, easily missed by the casual visitor who might only notice his calm good manners and a slight absent mindedness in conversation. His eyes alone betrayed the fugue state triggered in him by Alice’s behaviour at the Hunt Ball the previous night, along with the large amount he had drunk before his departure at ten o’clock. He registered then that Alice had no interest in even leaving the ball with him, never mind going on a world tour. He endured the stark realisation that all he had loved about her in the past was his own image of her. That Alice was no more...

Only his carving saved him on these occasions and he could work for many hours at a stretch on the most complex piece. He withdrew so completely into himself that he became detached from any hope or faith in the future, lost inside the world of his intricate creations. Today, he had no idea how long he had been working. Only the depth of the pile of shavings on the floor and the

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deep gleam of the polish on the one jamb he had completed gave any indication of the passage of time when he finally paused to take a long draught of water from his billycan.

He was working on a big piece, a mantelpiece. Three separate lengths of mahogany lay on the worktable, with their patterns drawn out in pencil. Their intricate looping lines depicted a continuous rope all along the lintel in a series of waves. Down the left hand jamb the rope fed through the hole of a millstone, the symbol of the family flour milling business, and ended in a knot. Down the right hand jamb the rope snaked into a noose, inside which was an image of Teddy’s own unmistakeable profile, with his long nose and frowning brows. The iconography was clearly a last protest against his enforced servitude to the family business, as demanded by his father William.

When he agreed to join the family milling business, he considered it to be tantamount to selling his soul for the love of Alice. There was no way he could earn a living and support a wife like Alice as a woodcarver, without the annual salary that came with a career in the mill.

When he met Alice, she had declared her sympathy with the arts in general and his carving skills in particular. He had delighted her with many gifts of fine work, in china and marble, in wax and in silver and her pleasure in them and her appreciation of the classical works in the museum they often visited, convinced him that they were twin souls. They stood united against the dull Midlands

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society with its Bridge nights and railway excursions, its fundraising suppers for the City Mission and its unrelenting Sunday church attendance. But all this charming bohemianism required substantial financial underpinnings, because Alice, it transpired, had expensive tastes.

When Mary was born Teddy discovered a deep tenderness in himself towards the tiny, red faced babe. He named her Mary Isabella after his mother and would have kept her by him all the time by choice. As it was he spent more time dandling her in his arms than Nanny approved of, or that Alice could even credit. Mary smiled for him first and quieted easier when Teddy spoke to her small rages. Alice did not share this tenderness; indeed in time she came to despise Teddy’s attentiveness to Mary. She dressed herself in ever more attractive and carefully chosen outfits, to take the air with her women friends.

Frankly, Alice found babies tedious and best left to their nursemaids till they were of an age to appear in the drawing room. And so their allegiances shifted, imperceptibly at first, and finally fell right out of alignment. Teddy had his riding, his carving, the mill and his daughter, while Alice’s sights were set on regaining her looks and redecorating their home, to the approval of her large new circle of women friends. She also discovered a real affinity for old china so that she became a local authority on the subject at the museum.

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Teddy worked on with the small chisel, rendering every twist of the coiling rope so that it stood out from the stippled ground. Gradually his mind turned back to the past days of their museum visits, when he and Alice took their tiny girl to visit the Egyptian mummies and tomb artefacts and they were a happy family. Now Alice spent several hours a week helping there as a guide and curator, labelling exhibits in her elegant copperplate handwriting and leading groups charmingly through the galleries. That, indeed, is where she must have met Charles Toller.

Suddenly exhausted, Teddy sat down on the old stool and took another swig of water. He had worked off his rage; he would oil the finished carving and cover it tenderly, resolving that tomorrow he would take out the horsewhip and ride the scoundrel down.

Mary noticed Charles Toller hurrying past as she stood in Alcott’s corner shop, waiting for her sixpenny bag of sweets to be filled. Her dog Barker was tied up outside and usually Charles would stop to pat him and greet her. But today he ignored her, although he waved to Mrs. Alcott. It was four o’clock and already getting dark on a slushy February day; she knew she must hurry home for tea. Her mother was always keen on punctuality and had recently given her an old fob watch.

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‘You are such a dreamer, Mary!’ Alice had told her. ‘Now you have no excuse for keeping me waiting.’ Mary knew that it was often the other way around, but she was very happy to keep the big old silver fob in her pocket and consulted it often, like Grandpa, flicking open the silver case with exactly his flourish. It usually took her ten minutes to walk home from the shop, so now she had no time to lose. Mary paid her sixpence to the shopkeeper, Mrs. Alcott, who made admiring comments about the watch and then she hurried home, timing the distances between the lamp posts and humming to herself.

Four fifteen, she noted, as she crunched up the gravel drive. The lights were already on in the study which meant Pa was already home.

‘I’m home,’ she cried, as she hung her wet coat on the newel post. Teddy came out of his study and hugged her, swinging her off her feet, as usual.

‘Put me down, Pa! I have to run and brush my hair before tea with Mama,’ she told him and made to run up the stairs.

‘No Mama today,’ he told her with his mock mournful face; ‘she’s gone off on a mission. You’ll have to make do with your old Pa.’

This was a puzzle for Mary. There must have been a sudden emergency, for she was sure it was Friday and her mother did not go out until six on Friday evenings. Pa seemed cheerful, though, and showed her some drawings in his study for the new mantelpiece he was designing for

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his friend Peter’s wedding present. And so they went into tea, hand in hand, where Nanny was waiting with a perfect Victoria sponge and the big yellow camel teapot that Pa could tell such funny stories about. The camel was kneeling, with a basket on its humpy back, out of which poked the head of a man in a turban, which was the knob of the lid. The spout was the camel’s neck, and Mary loved to see the tea pour out of his mouth.

She put her bag of sweets into the old biscuit tin, from which she was allowed to take two every day after lunch.

‘Do you know where Mama is?’ she asked Nanny, who, she thought, looked a bit cross.

‘I can’t say, for certain, Mary,’ was the reply, ‘but she had her new bonnet on and told me to expect her back around eight o’clock.’ So they had two large pieces of cake each and Nanny had a second cup of tea. They played Beggar My Neighbour until it was six o’clock and bath time and then Pa gave her another hug and went back downstairs to get on with his drawings. It took ages to get through bath time because Nanny said her hair needed a thorough wash. Mary’s hair was brown and straight (‘Poor Mary!’ said curly headed Alice, ‘you take after your father’) but it gleamed and shone with all the brushing it had in front of the gas fire in the nursery and Mary rather liked the way she looked as she stared into the old mirror, in her white nightgown with the blue spots Alice had sewn for her.

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Soon the clock pointed to seven o’clock and Nanny put Mary to bed and read her a story from the Golden Pathway compendium. It was about a small boy who stowed away on a ship to get away from an evil uncle. He landed in Australia, was collected by a kind family of cousins and raised a fledging cockatoo that learned to sit on his shoulder and speak amazingly well.

‘Aunt Agnes comes from Australia! Do tell Mama to come and kiss me goodnight when she gets in,’ said Mary as Nanny tucked her up.

‘Yes, dear, and mind you say your prayers in bed before you go to sleep.’

After Nanny blew the candle out and left her room, the only light that came from the hall was through the crack in the door. Mary prayed hard that her mother would get home safe. She could just imagine the rustling of her skirts as she came up the stairs and the scent of her perfume as she bent over the little bed. But the church clock struck eight and the rustlings turned into giant wrapping paper that Mary was being packaged with, as she dreamed she was a doll in a gift box for a little girl who would love her very much.

Mary woke up still feeling safely enfolded and it took her a few minutes to remember that her mother had not kissed her goodnight. She hopped out of bed and made her way towards her mother’s room, where she could tell straight away the bed had not been slept in. The cold feeling that she had experienced in church on Christmas

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Day returned and she stood transfixed for a moment, like a rabbit on the high road. Nanny found her on the landing and bustled her off to get dressed for riding.

‘And don’t forget your teeth. Your mother has been delayed in Oadby,’ she told Mary, ‘and she sends you her love and expects to be home by this evening. Now come along downstairs and have your breakfast. Your father has already gone out.’

But Gladys the cook was not as good at subterfuge and Mary guessed, as she sat down, that something was badly amiss. She noticed Nanny and Cook exchange glances as she ate her porridge and quite lost her appetite for anything more from the sideboard.

‘I’m supposed to be going riding today with Pa,’ she told them, ‘may I go and ask Sam when he will be back?’ And she ran out of the breakfast room with her toast in her hand, leaving the two women to a hurried exchange of opinions on the crisis that loomed with Alice’s departure. Both of them were scathing in their judgements on her actions.

‘For sure she’s run off with that Toller at last, she’ll never be back tonight!’

‘Did you see Mr. Teddy ride off this morning? In a fury that she’s dealt him this blow.’

‘And what will Mr. William say? And as for that poor child,’ Nanny shook her head …

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Absently buttering a last piece of toast, Gladys replied, ‘There’s one thing though, we all love her to bits here and her own mother’s so often away that the child will do well enough with her doting father and us two to mind her.’

Nanny poured herself a cup of tea from the still warm teapot and took it upstairs to drink thoughtfully in the nursery, while Gladys finished the toast and called the parlour maid to clear the breakfast things.

When Mary reached the stable yard she found Sam saddling up her pony Ezra.

‘I’m to ride out with you today, Miss Mary,’ he told her fondly, ‘and a regular good day it is for a ride too.’

He told Mary that her father has been called out on unexpected urgent business and had left him strict instructions on how long and in which direction the day’s riding lesson was to be. Mary hugged Ezra, gave him her toast crust, and climbed onto his sturdy brown back. The two horses walked steadily out of the yard and into the lane. Sam led the way into the bridle path across the fields to Market Harborough and refused to answer any of her questions as to where her father has gone.

So now, Mary thought, I don’t have either parent! I am ALONE IN THE WORLD. Just suppose they were never to come back for me. I would be in charge of the household and could tell Gladys what I wanted for supper.

When they reached the open field, Sam and Mary set their horses trotting, which reminded Mary that the February gymkhana was soon to be held at Sleighton and

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she needed to practise her jumps. Sam was quite agreeable to that idea (indeed he was particularly easy going with her all morning, she reflected later) and so they cantered over to May Blackwell’s paddock where there were jumps and spent an hour training Ezra to follow Sam’s big horse Billy over the course. Billy looked comic taking the low fences, but Mary cheered him on and Sam cheered Ezra as he bravely leapt over everything Mary steered him towards.

The game ended when Mary’s pony decided he had had enough and stopped dead at the brush fence so that she slid over his head and landed in the long grass. Sam picked her up, lifted her back on and insisted they take the jump again, ‘or else he’ll think he’s master.’ So Mary turned Ezra around and he leapt the fence obediently, rewarded with a sugar lump from Sam’s seemingly endless supply. As the church clock struck noon they turned their horses for home, to be back in time for lunch.

Agnes was waiting in the stable yard when the two horses with their riders clattered in. Mary was very pleased to see her and dismounted quickly. She told her of the gymkhana practice while Sam led the horses to the water trough.

‘Thank you, Sam,’ said Agnes, ‘we are glad that Mary has such a good tutor.’

Mary noticed them exchange looks, like Gladys and Nanny had at breakfast. Why was everybody acting so mysteriously today? She had forgotten about Aunt Agnes. Whatever happened to her parents there would be no halt

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to her afternoon geography lessons. Aunt Agnes had been a headmistress before she married Grandpa and was a formidable teacher, able to easily quell a classroom of twenty boisterous, fifteen year-old girls. Whereas her mother was easily coaxed into various indulgences, especially reading in bed after her father had put her light out, Mary knew better than to question her aunt’s authority on any matter at all.

Agnes and Mary settled down at the old oak table in the nursery. Mary thought it should really be called the schoolroom now as she wasn’t a baby any more. The big atlas was open between them with mostly blue showing on its circle on today’s page. There were lots of tiny dots over the top half, one big pink lump on the left, a little pair of pink lumps in the middle and a great big white cloud shape along the bottom of the world.

‘Oceania!’ cried Mary, ‘and the big bit is Australia.’

‘Well done,’ said Agnes, ‘and what are those two islands next down from it?’

‘New Zealand, where Aunt Nancy lives,’ Mary replied happily. She knew that bit of the map well, because Agnes favoured for her lessons parts of the world she had visited and had once taken a cruise to visit Nancy soon after her

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marriage to William. (William had not gone with her, being a man of routine with a business to keep going.)

Mary hoped that her lesson today would be a luxuriant trawl through the big album of snapshots and postcards her aunt had compiled during the cruise. But instead she had to get out her writing book and do some awful sums about the latitude and longitude of Christchurch and its distance from the Equator. By the time they had worked all these out to Agnes’s satisfaction it was half past three and Mary was finding it hard to concentrate.

Agnes informed her that this was work that girls of twelve studied at boarding school and that Mary should be proud of herself. One day she would be old enough to attend a big school and Agnes was certain that she would acquit herself very respectably. Girls were every bit as clever as boys, and needed to pay attention to their education so as to lead worthwhile careers when they grew up.

‘But I’m only seven now and Mama teaches me writing and French,’ cried Mary quickly. She did not feel at all ready for big school yet.

‘Ah,’ replied Agnes, closing the atlas carefully and taking Mary’s hand, ‘your mother may not be home for quite a little while, I think. She loves you very much and wants you to be a brave girl and look after your dear Papa.’

‘May she not be home tonight then?’ asked Mary in surprise.

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‘Not for some weeks,’ her aunt answered, taking Mary into her arms and hugging her hard.

‘Is she ill?’

‘No, but her mother is, and she has been called away to nurse her.’

Poor Granny Marjory, thought Mary, Maybe Pa will take me over to visit them both, if Mama is going to be away so long?’

But Agnes said ‘Ah, I can hear your father downstairs. Go down and tell him about the latitude of Christchurch!”

‘And the jumps Ezra did this morning,’ Mary said as she closed her workbook, thanking Agnes politely before hopping all the way down the big staircase as she had been warned not to do at least one hundred times before.

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A Journal and a Letter

February 1913

34 Avenue Road Leicester England The World

11 February 1913 It is my eighth birthday. This is my ninth year. Mama is

always at her best for birthdays; and when I woke up I thought maybe she would appear after all and say Surprise! As I sat up I found the next best thing though. At the foot of my bed like a Christmas stocking, was a big hat box, with a note in Mama’s writing that said:

Many Happy Returns to my big girl! Eight years old today, You are always in my thoughts, ever your loving mother.

I untied the big pink bow and unwrapped the tissue paper that had once held an expensive hat I remembered her taking out of that same box to show me. She has made me a lovely big doll, with hinged cloth arms and legs, dressed in satin, with a dark navy serge travelling cloak with a hood. She has a small smiley mouth and big brown eyes that gaze bravely, far away. There is also a little suitcase that once held Mama’s manicure tools, but now has tiny bottles and combs, a small teddy bear, spare clothes and a flannel for a bath towel.

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I hugged the big doll tight and promised her never to leave her behind. I am going to call her Matilda. Then Nanny put her head round the door and wished me many happy returns and admired Matilda very much. She said that Pa was downstairs waiting to have breakfast with me and to leave dolly on my bed, please, we don’t want to get egg on her face just yet.

And so I took her cloak off and sat Matilda at the end of the bed so she could gaze out of the window. When I reached the breakfast room Pa hugged me and said congratulations, my fine daughter, and gave me a bunch of snowdrops fresh from the garden. He told me my present was still in his workshop.

But I could see poor Pa was worn out with worry about Mama and so I decided not to tell him about my doll just yet. I put the flowers in a glass and we ate toast and honey with cups of tea while Pa glanced through the newspaper and I opened lovely cards from Cook and Nanny.

After breakfast we went out into the cold yard in our big coats and hurried into the workshop all nice and warm from the little fire. So I knew Pa had been up early already and working there. On the work bench was a miniature chest of six drawers, with ivory handles and M.I.P inlaid in ivory on the top. I told him it was so wonderful I would keep it all my life! You are so clever, Pa, I said.

I picked it up carefully and took it over to the chair by the fire, where I opened and shut all the drawers while I listened to what he had to tell me, but I did not grasp what he meant for a while because I so did not want to hear it. My own Pa is

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planning to go away too because Mama has left home. Also the constable is threatening to lay charges over something to do with Charles Toller and horsewhipping. Pa says he only meant to give him a fright. He plans to go and stay with Aunt Nancy in New Zealand.

Take me with you, I told him, I know all about New Zealand and I can teach you Longitude and Latitude on the way out, I can manage without Mama but not without both of you.

And Pa says he will speak to Aunt Agnes.

A week later, Mary was still mystified about her future. She regretted now her impetuous promise to go to New Zealand. Pa was still furious, incommunicado, either holed up in his workshop or out on the horse, and there was no sign of Alice’s return. Mary began to hope that nothing would come of the plan and that Pa’s rage would subside as it so often had before. Life certainly went on just the same, but how dear and familiar her bedroom looked, and the nursery at Empire Road and all the old roads she rode down with Sam, once she pictured leaving them behind!

She did know her Mama was still away caring for Grandma Marjory so was astonished to meet the old lady in the lane one afternoon when she was riding Ezra home.

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‘Oh,’ she cried, ‘I am so surprised to see you here, and glad you are so much better!’

She dismounted and led her pony along beside Grandma Marjory.

‘Have you come back with Mama?’

‘I’ve never been ill! I don’t know what they’ve been telling you. I’ve come to say goodbye, dearie, now that you’re off on such a long journey. I’ve not seen much of you, but you’re my oldest granddaughter, and I’ve a right to see you before you go.’

‘I don’t know that I am going!’ cried Mary. ‘And where’s Mama then?’

‘I’m sure I don’t know, Mary dear. Nobody tells me anything either! But I heard in the village you were off soon to New Zealand and I got the bus straight over to try and see you to wish you well. Maybe it’s all gossip. I got you a keepsake for your journey, but you’d best not open it till you know you’re really leaving us all.’

Poor old Marjory’s mouth trembled but she looked defiant, and suddenly very like Alice, as she handed over a small envelope. Mary thanked her.

‘Mama has made me a lovely doll for my birthday.’

‘Did she, dear? I made your mother a doll she called Lily, when she was about your age,’ the old lady replied.

‘Oh! I know her,’ Mary answered. Mama keeps her in a chest of drawers in her bedroom.’

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Then another thought struck her, ‘Aren’t I your only granddaughter, Grandma?’

‘Bless you, no. I have four more lovely girls you’ve never met! Alice is the eldest of my five and the one I see least of. But you have cousins your age and are likely to have more by the time you return.’

Mary burst into tears at all this information, and the old lady gave her a big hug.

‘You’ll find out soon enough what’s up and I’ll have the devil to pay if they find it’s me let the cat out of the bag. Look, I’m away now, Mary dear. You’re a fine looking child and a brave one. I’ll doubtless hear news of you, and I’ll keep you in my prayers.’

Then she scuttled out of sight down a side path and never looked back as Mary got on her pony again with the envelope in her pocket and rode hurriedly home.

‘Sam!’ she cried as she came into the yard. ‘Do you know that I’m to go to New Zealand?’

His face showed that he did not. ‘When’s that then?’ he said disbelievingly.

‘Soon!’ she shouted, sobbing again, and ran up the stairs to ask Agnes.

But it was her grandfather who caught her on the stairs, and made her sit down in her riding clothes in the library and start again slowly. Then he poured her a glass of soda water from the syphon and poured himself another one with whisky in it.

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‘Nothing’s settled yet, Mary my dear, and we think you must decide for yourself. It was all my idea to send you and your parents on a fine adventure, and I blame myself for charging in like Father Christmas and setting off all this upheaval. Now Teddy’s determined to go, and your mother is not, and so you have to make your choice. You are so dear to your aunt and me that we’d gladly keep you here at Empire Road for the year.

‘You asked your Pa to take you, I gather, but you need to think very carefully now whether you will be brave enough to leave all you know here for a year on the other side of the world.’

‘Darling Grandpa, I do and I don’t,’ Mary wailed. ‘Let’s go and ask Aunt Agnes!’

‘That is always the best idea,’ said William gravely. ‘I think she’s in the drawing room.’

So they went downstairs together and met Teddy, tense and shivering, just coming into the hall through the front door.

‘O, Pa!’’’’ cried Mary, as she flung her arms around him.

‘We are going to have a Council of War,’ said William. ‘It is time to sort this all out.’

‘Who told her?’ said Teddy angrily.

‘Marjory laid wait for her in the lane,’ his father replied, opening the drawing room door.

‘Grandma was very kind to me, and she gave me a keepsake!’ protested Mary, bursting into tears. She ran up

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to her bedroom and flung herself on her bed, with Matilda clutched tightly in her arms. Then she opened the envelope from Alice’s mother Marjory. Inside was a greetings card, printed with a posy of roses, and a verse underneath. Mary thought it very beautiful and read the verse solemnly to herself.

So this was a keepsake. Mary knew au revoir too, and imagined her mother saying it gaily as she waved her friends goodbye. She would keep it always, but just to herself, she decided. So she hid it in her autograph book and lay down again, comforted.

‘Well, I am glad the child’s been informed now,’ said Agnes calmly, after Teddy had gone up and apologised to Mary, and brought her back down to the gathering in the drawing room.

‘And really it is not such a wild idea, Mary dear, for you to travel out with your father. You could meet your New Zealand cousins - and learn a great deal more

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geography than you ever can from your books and atlases. I have already written to Nancy to inform her your Pa is coming to visit.’

‘There is a ship leaving Liverpool in six weeks,’ Teddy said. ‘I have been making enquiries. Shall I book one ticket or two?’

He regarded Mary so fondly, with his funny frown that she knew that she would go with him, wherever he needed to go. But she still did not know where Alice was, until a postcard arrived from France, handed over by Mrs. Alcott when Mary went to the shop the following week, after minute inspection by favoured female friends of the shopkeeper.

How glamorous my Mama is, thought Mary. How brave to travel there by herself. Does she know I am going away so far? Will she come back to say goodbye? But she did not like to ask her family this, and the subject of her mother was never mentioned. It was Cook who told her that Charlie Toller was there too and that Betsy Toller and her children were not at home to visitors.

‘And you’re not to say as I said so,’ said Cook, bursting to pass on the news to Nanny that the poor child was still in the dark. So now it was decided, and there was all the packing up to do.

Cats are pragmatic about upheavals. Minty had simply moved into Mary’s bedroom when the fire in the sewing room went out. When Mary ran into her room next day she stopped short at the sight of the great trunk, battered

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and black, and blocking the way. She inched past it, to sit on her bed with Minty. She hated the sight of the horrid thing. She knew what it meant. This was the end of her life here. That trunk was here to stay, to have more and more of her treasures packed into it. One day soon it would be closed and roped up and carried downstairs, leaving her room stripped of everything she loved. And then she would follow it. How could she bear it? She picked up Matilda and Old Ted and hugged them absently as she glared at it, stroking the cat on her lap.

It was a huge travelling chest; piratical, big enough to hold her own self as well all her possessions, and covered in labels and stickers: Europa Hotel, Singapore; Hotel Cecil, Delhi; Astor House, Shanghai. She read them all, reluctantly fascinated. How many times had it travelled the world, conveying other people on other voyages, reluctantly or not?

She finally got off her bed and approached the trunk gingerly. It was actually navy blue, with wooden struts and reinforced iron corners. There were heavy leather handles on each end and three iron hinges along the back. The big hasps were brass with key holes and it had a brass badge: Made in Petersburg, VA by Seward & Sons.

The first label she read was Thom. Kilgour Esq, Melbourne, N.S.W. Australia. That name meant nothing to her but the next one explained all. Miss Agnes Kilgour, c/o Christchurch College, Oxford, England from Melbourne NSW.

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This was the trunk in which Aunt Agnes had carried all her possessions from Melbourne to her university life in England, where she had never been in her life before. How fearful and excited her dear aunt must have been, embarking on such a long journey! This trunk had been made in America, had taken somebody out to Australia, and come over to England with Agnes. And now it was preparing to go back again. So people often travelled across the world and the lucky ones returned, sometimes several times. Their stuff could cram into this tiny space and then expand again into their new rooms somewhere else. She ran her hands over the old polished surfaces and walked around the back of it. She opened the lid.

The inside smelt of camphor and old dust. The chest was lined with patterned paper, with compartments round the base, and straps inside the lid to hold small items secure when it was opened. At the bottom were two pearl buttons winking in the little pile of dust. Minty climbed off the bed and stalked right round it. Then he jumped in, prowled round the bottom and stretched up on his hind legs to look out over the side. Mary laughed at him then, and climbed in too. Inside was like a very small house, solid and safe. But too hard, so she climbed out again and collected some blankets, a cushion, a book, then Ted and Matilda. Now it looked more like home. She got in again and arranged them into a nest, tucked herself up under the blanket and opened the book to read to her charges, with the cat on her lap.

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When Agnes came in later, she found Mary and her friends asleep inside her camp and the sight brought tears to her eyes. Poor child, setting off from all she knew, without saying goodbye to her mother! How fearfully Agnes had packed that same trunk herself, she recalled, to travel to Oxford twenty years ago; and her father before her too, when he set off from Sydney for Medical School in Melbourne. She knew that Nancy would care for the child as well as Agnes could and could only trust that Teddy would bring her safely home. She offered up a fervent prayer for Mary’s welfare, and quietly left the room.

Agnes went to her study and sat down heavily at her desk. The last six weeks had been the most tumultuous of any time during her marriage to William and it was taking all the powers she could muster to maintain a steady course during these wild family storms. She pictured herself piloting a crowded liferaft which was taking on water with crazed passengers leaping over the sides. She sat down at her desk and wrote to her sister.

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St Martins Empire Road Leicester

20 February 1913 My dearest Nancy,

I write in such distress from the events that have taken place here since Christmas! And only wish you were not on the other side of the world when I need your counsel and sympathy so.

In a nutshell, Alice has bolted. Teddy has then caused a local scandal by riding after Charles with a horsewhip down the Farmington Lane two days after the Hunt Ball. William is furious that his darling Alice has thus disgraced the family; and Betsy Toller and her children have not been seen in public since. The next week, Alice and Charles eloped, late on Valentine’s Day and, according to Sam who drove them to Leicester Station, they are headed for France. And now, as you will have learnt by his telegram, Teddy plans to bring Mary over to stay with you all in New Zealand.

On Valentine’s Day! Alice has read too many of those sentimental novels and doubtless now sees herself as a romantic heroine. And the one ignored in all this is poor dear Mary, only just eight years old and with her whole world turned upside down.

To be fair, Alice must have assumed that Mary’s life would continue on an even keel; she knew Teddy and I were closest to her and that in many ways she was peripheral to her daughter’s life. In some ways William has been the trigger for all this, by deciding Teddy should go to New Zealand. He will not discuss it

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with me, but I suspect he hopes to keep Teddy out of the war which he believes is threatening us all. Poor Teddy was at first keen to leave the mill and take his family on such a fine adventure; and then, when he found that Alice had run off with the local auctioneer, of course he was even keener to leave Leicester and the mill behind.

Mary just insists on going too, and though she will leave a big hole in our lives it may all be for the best; Teddy has always been wonderfully close to his daughter and I trust him to guard her with his life. He needs to flee the whole household for a year or so. William is still perfectly capable of running the business. Robert can help him too.

And I do believe that Mary can cope, she is made of remarkably stern stuff, despite her irresponsible parents. After all, many an eight year old boy is sent away to school. She will probably find much to enjoy in the many new experiences ahead of her during the next year, under your loving and sensible care.

I will keep her dog Barker by my side and Sam will ride Ezra. Mary so loves them; and I know you will find her a puppy; Good heavens! What am I thinking? She will be on a farm with more animals than she will ever know with us here in Leicester and her cousins for friends (Helen and Cassie are nearly her age, I recall). She is a very clever girl, reads a lot and loves natural history and classical legends. I will pack lots of books and her atlas for you all to share.

Dear Nancy, who would have thought that we would grow up to be the wives of men at the furthest distance possible to each other! I never intended to marry at all. I feel fortunate that I had my school teaching career and then belatedly a rich family life

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with William. For all his grumpy ways, he can be a dear and loving husband, sometimes surprisingly shrewd. He loves Mary as I do; she is the light of our lives. We entrust her to you and Jonty, in the firm faith that you will care for her as one of your own and send her back safe to us before the year is out. I send this in haste, to catch the SS Oronsay, due to sail a week before the Athenic departs from Liverpool with Teddy and Mary aboard.

With my heartiest good wishes for 1913.

Your V. Affectionate sister Agnes

P.S. Write to me as soon as they arrive!

Agnes blotted the paper on the big leather-bound pad, sealed and addressed the envelope to Auckland P.O., c/o the SS Oronsay and called for Sam. He was to saddle Twentyman and ride to the station, where he must deliver the letter to the stationmaster to be put on the 8.20 train to Tilbury. Sam took the five pound note respectfully and nearly ran out of the house in his haste to be useful. What goings-on, he thought to himself. His mother will scarcely believe him when he calls round on Sunday with all the news.

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The Family Scatters

March 1913

Alice and Charlie were happy as larks in a small auberge at the cheap end of the Côte d’Azur. The journey there had been such fun, on the boat train from Newhaven. Alice wore a wedding ring that had belonged to Charlie’s mother, which he pocketed before they left and placed with mock ceremony on her hand in the taxi en route to the train. So romantic! On Valentine’s Day! They were like children bunking off school, delighted with each other and fondly regarded by the French hotelier for whom they signed the register as Monsieur et Madame Toller.

Presently a telegram arrived from England, sent by Alice’s mother Marjory.

TEDDY AND MARY LEAVE FOR NZ APRIL 16 STOP SS ATHENIC TO AUCKLAND STOP DOLLY GOES TOO LOVE MOTHER

This was a shock to Alice, whose plans for Mary had included discreet quarterly visits when back on business in England. Thank goodness she had Nanny deliver the doll on her birthday. Quel surprise! The travelling cloak and suitcase idea was just inspired. Mary would enjoy packing for her doll and playing with her on board.

Surely, Mary would be back within the year? Yet Charlie says there is a war coming and not to be too sure. He thinks Teddy will be well out of it and would not put

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it past him to be using all this as an excuse to avoid enlisting. He was still very annoyed about the horsewhipping, such a pantomime. Teddy’s whip only connected with his shoulder once (though the memory of that sharp crack still lingers) and his pride will take longer to heal than the blister. Idiot! Alice was secretly rather touched at Teddy’s dramatic behaviour, but, of course, agreed with Charlie that her husband had been absurd. We are not in the Wild West after all.

The news of this departure was soon seen as an advantage as regards the disagreeable divorces both Charlie and Alice had each to arrange. Betty was always amenable, and Charlie told Alice his lawyers may be able to make a case for Teddy’s desertion in absentia and at least on the grounds of unsound mind. Though Alice regretted Teddy was taking Mary away for so long, what could she do about it? It was out of her hands and Mary would now be one less problem to manage.

She decided to write her a postcard and send it via Nanny. No, she would send it in a letter to her mother and Marjory could slip it to Mrs. Alcott at the shop as there would certainly be no more visits to Avenue Road by anyone on Alice’s side of the family. Alice selected a card with a Roman shield on it from her collection of artistic postal cards.

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Mary was such a clever clogs, she would enjoy translating that one.

On the back she wrote:

Bon Voyage my darling brave girl you know we will always be close, wherever we are in the world. Remember me to Aunt Nancy,

xxx Mama

Between 1900 and 1910 over 700,000 emigrants departed from England for New Zealand, so many that the newspapers gave up on publishing passenger lists. On Wednesday, 16th April 1913, Teddy and Mary became part of this exodus, boarding the SS Athenic at Liverpool

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for the eight-week voyage out. They were among the fortunate ones, with relations ready to vouch for them, and the wherewithal to afford cabins.

Mary was surprised how quickly her old life slipped away once they were on board the SS Athenic. Her farewells to all the family and her treasured places had been heartfelt of course, but tinged with excitement to be embarking on such a great trip with her father. Aunt Agnes told her to learn all she could, to write often and to be assured that everything would still be just as she left it on her return, probably just a year away.

‘And Barker will be fine with me,’ said William, ‘I will exercise the little fellow, and Sam will ride your pony for you.’

‘You’ll find your Aunt Nancy very like me,’ Agnes told her, ‘and you can be the one helping pack next year’s Christmas box!’

There was so much to learn and absorb about shipboard life. She shared a tiny cabin with an elderly spinster, Miss Brett, on her way to be a companion to an old lady in Auckland, and rather nervous herself of the adventure. Her circumstances had recently become insupportable, she told them, due to unfortunate investments, and so, at a time in her life when she had expected to retire in comfort she was now embarked on an uncertain future, in the employ of a person she had never met. So little money did she have left that she was grateful

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of the savings in sharing a cabin with Mary, and they soon became allies.

‘I’ve had my ups and downs, dear,’ she told Mary, ‘and will just accept what the Good Lord sends from now on, for who knows what tomorrow will bring?’

Mary was glad to have the top bunk and Miss Brett relieved to have the bottom one, with both their small trunks stowed underneath. Matilda was a great comfort, to be hugged close at night, and to keep watch on her bunk by day. Miss Brett marvelled at Alice’s doll making skills and exclaimed over her costume. Mary was very proud of her mother then and felt able to tell the whole story to her new friend, and to show her some photographs of Barker and her grandparents. Miss Brett proved a fine listener, though less forthcoming about her own story. They took to walking daily along the decks of the ship and when they looked downstairs through the second class decks they agreed they were both most fortunate by comparison. They were told that there were even cheaper billets below in steerage where hammocks hung on the way out, before the hold was refrigerated and filled with New Zealand sheep meat for the return to England. Ugh, thought Mary, imagining the cold air creeping in as she slept.

Teddy had his own cabin with a desk and a tiny set of carving tools, and before long they formed the great plan of building a model of Isabella’s house when they arrived in New Zealand.

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‘It will be a way to describe our English life to our New Zealand family and a gift from our old world to the new one.’

So Teddy carved five small figures to represent the family, with a small dog in a basket that Mary wound around with black and white wool, like Barker. Many happy hours were spent drawing up plans from memory, and in making dolls and furniture to scale. The ship’s carpenters were amused by the project and supplied scraps of timber and tin, varnish and paint, while Miss Brett knitted tiny blankets, and made a fine drawing room carpet in petit point.

Mary found that small lumps of putty could be moulded into all kinds of dishes and foodstuffs. She made scale models of sacks of potatoes, a big roast turkey on a dish and strings of onions on a rope made of brown wool. Books, journals and albums for the library piled up, stored in matchboxes, which themselves did duty as chests of drawers and trunks. Postage stamps were begged from the other passengers to form royal albums, a stamp to a page, in covers of sailcloth.

The first port of call was Tenerife, where most of the passengers went ashore to stretch their legs and marvel at the foreignness of it all. Mary posted a long letter home to Aunt Agnes and William. He and Mary chose postcards for Leicester and for Aunt Nancy in Auckland. Before they went ashore, Mary gave Miss Brett a postcard bought from the ship’s purser with a picture of the SS Athenic to post

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secretly to her mother. They bought fresh pineapples and rode in a donkey cart, besieged by hawkers with trays full of souvenirs. They could not resist a tiny souvenir doll boy in national costume, to serve as the butler in the doll’s house. There was a lady doll too with a full skirt and a tray of bananas on her head, which Mary knew would amuse Miss Brett. Mary’s cabin mate had kept her purse shut, and whiled away the afternoon sitting on a bench in the harbour, happily observing all the porters with their huge loads on their heads.

‘Oh, you shouldn’t have!’ she cried delightedly as Teddy and Mary handed her the little ornament. They could not have chosen a better gift, to live on her dressing table for ever more.

In this way the great ship travelled on round the Cape of Good Hope to Cape Town, while the climate became ever more tropical, and Mary’s geography lessons all came true. They watched the dolphins and seabirds that played around the bows and admired the night skies with their foreign constellations and huge moons. At mealtimes they discovered many other passengers bound for Auckland and shared tales of their past lives and their plans for the future. There were many farewells at Cape Town, with ten new passengers embarking, bound for Sydney or New Zealand.

Mary began to feel she had been on this ship all her life, and wished to sail on for ever. She wrote:

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25° Lat S, 3° Long E The Middle of the Ocean

April 24

Dearest Mama,

The nice purser has given me 5 sheets of special ship’s notepaper, so you can see I really am on a ship now. If you get this, it has been posted from Cape Town by my new friend Miss Brett, who is sharing a cabin with me. I have the top bunk! Matilda keeps watch on my bunk by day and Miss Brett tucks her up with me at night times. She thinks you are a very good stitcher. I showed her some pictures of you and Grandpa and dear Barker, and your postcard from France.

Pa has his own cabin; he writes and draws a lot. Also he is making a doll family and some furniture for a doll’s house he will build when we get to Aunt Nancy’s. I have made a dog with black and white wool, in a basket, and Miss Brett is knitting a carpet.

Pa says lots of houses used to be made in bits in England and shipped out. We have seen so many large fish and birds, and crossed the Equator. It is terribly hot. I write in my journal every day.

Ever your loving daughter

Mary

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Teddy wrote:

24 April 1913

SS Athenic

My dear Papa and Agnes,

We are now sufficiently settled on board ship to afford the time to write and describe to you all our adventures since our heartfelt farewells at Leicester station; only last week! It seems an age away.

Mary is by my side, writing to Aunt Nancy, at which she will probably do a better job than me. She certainly has better handwriting skills.

We alighted our train at Liverpool and were fortunate to find we could board our ship that very day. The SS Athenic is a handsome vessel; 12,000 tons and built in 1901. She has four masts, and one massive funnel whence the smoke from her great

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steam boilers discharges the residue from the coal the poor boilermen stoke her with unceasingly, however rough the seas (the heat in there is appalling). There are 66 in First Class, 117 in Second Class, and 460 poor souls down in Third.

The hold is crammed with hammocks, provisions and dry goods for the journey out, and with refrigerated meats from New Zealand on the way back.

We have snug cabins, with all conveniences; Mary shares hers with a Miss Brett, an arrangement that luckily suits them both. At present we are up on the top deck, at the mouth of the Mersey Bar, where we must wait for two hours. Another ship just passed us in the dusk, bound for New York and travelling at twice our speed. Mary likened it to a huge palace of floating lights, and indeed it has a fairy-tale beauty.

We are both delighted by the large adventure on which your generosity has enabled us to embark; and determined to profit by it to the advantage of all our families.

By the way, our ship is commanded by a Captain Kempson, of Worcestershire, who remembers playing cricket against you in Leicester in 1890, and sends you his kind regards.

May 6

We were seasick and off rations for two days, but are now happily putting away breakfasts of porridge, treacle and coffee before exercises of various kinds on deck in fair weather and innumerable indoor pastimes in foul. These occur between the very substantial meals served up with great ceremony; you may

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imagine the Grosvenor Hotel afloat and travelling at fourteen knots per hour. We are seated at Captain Kempson’s table, thanks to your cricketing prowess! Mary is allowed up for dinner but is sometimes too tired by then and prefers to take her supper with Miss Brett in their cabin.

We lately passed the coast of Wales and came to Fishguard, where a tug came out to pilot us through the straits. He took back with him six stowaways who were discovered in the coal bunkers. Then we travelled fast and smooth all the way to the Bay of Biscay which proved quite calm, contrary to its reputation. The weather has become quite tropical, to Mary’s delight; she informs me of the degrees Fahrenheit on the ship’s barometer every morning. They have put canvas sails over the decks for shade so it is very pleasant to read in the deckchairs provided. Only those ladies much concerned with their complexions have avoided the sunburn, while Mary and I are as brown as gypsies and quite as nonchalant.

As we came to the Equator, we found the sea of a deepest blue and glassy as a lake. A tank of seawater was rigged up out of spare canvas, and a pole put across, upon which I took my turn in pillow fighting for prizes of sweets and tobacco. None of us lasted more than three minutes before a good dunking, itself quite a delight in this climate. I could not but feel for those poor men down in that hellhole of a boiler room. I hear that they drink vast quantities of water as they work, and drench each other with buckets of seawater at the end of their shifts.

The wonders of nature are everywhere apparent now we are in the tropics; we have admired shoals of porpoises, and have spotted three sharks, two whales and magical showers of

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flying fish. As we rounded the Cape of Good Hope, we encountered the strange phenomenon of phosphorescence in the water; ribbons of electric lights playing round the stern and winding round the propeller.

We perceived Table Mountain, flat against the horizon and ninety miles distant. An albatross, with a wingspan like Sinbad’s Giant Roc, has just glided over our decks, and we look forward to a few days ashore soon in Cape Town.

May 9

Launches charged two shillings to take those passengers who wished to go ashore; and we took Miss Brett with us in our boat. (Her circumstances are very straitened.) We had two hours to admire the shops, and Mary and I left her happily observing the porters on the wharf while we took a tram to the city centre. Yes, trams! Just like Leicester. And the shops too were every bit as grand and stocked with luxuries. The population is very mixed, with Hottentots, Boers and Kaffirs thronging the streets alongside the white settlers. Mary chose a tiny black Kaffir boy beautifully made of straw and rags, and a mother doll with her baby on her back for Miss Brett. Many new passengers boarded and at 8 pm we sailed out of Cape Town Harbour, bound for Melbourne, Australia.

May 13

Now we are in the Indian Ocean and the Southerly gales have come upon us with a vengeance. One tremendous wave knocked a sailor sixty feet along the deck and he narrowly escaped washing overboard, which would have been instant

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death. As it was, he broke both kneecaps, and has been retired to the sickbay for the rest of the journey.

The parlour games have become more convoluted as the weeks pass. We have debates now, after dinner. Last night’s moot was “Would Socialism Benefit the Working Classes?” I wished we had you with us, Agnes, to provide some well-informed arguments to the affirmative; as it was, all ended in a quarrel and a rout, due partly to the brandy, and to the fact that the whole third class deck below was not invited to participate.

I am reading the books you shrewdly provided, Agnes, with great interest. The N.Z. Settler’s Handbook is an up-to-date compendium of all those practical things I should need to know if I did not have Jonty and Nancy’s homestead to start off from. The photographs of maize, twice the height of a farm worker, and of their herds of mongrel cows, left outside to graze all year round, show Mary and I a glimpse of the differences we will find on arrival.

May 30, Melbourne

Another day ashore, in Melbourne, where we were again amazed and impressed by the wealth and fashionable life of this Australian city. The climate is cool again as in Europe, and the flowers and trees abundant in the Botanical Gardens and all along the wide streets. The municipal buildings are recently built but outdo London in scale; their Houses of Parliament, Churches, and the huge hotels along Bourke Street filled us with awe. An efficient tram service took us from museum to park to cathedral and back to the port when we were tired out with

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sightseeing. The Athenic has become our home now and we return to it with relief, to sleep the sleep of the just in our wood-panelled cabins.

Two days further sailing will bring us to Finger Wharf, Woollamooloo. We hear that Sydney is a warm-hearted festive place. At any rate, we will be sorry to leave the ship and board another, for a long week’s sail to Auckland, our final destination. To be honest, I have begun to fear the realities of our future year in New Zealand after such a long stay apart from the cares of the world. There have been sporadic newspapers, and some radio reports, but all seems so distant on this lotus-eating-island-of-a-ship that I find it hard to take an interest.

But now I read rumours of war in Europe, about which the sentiments among the Australian guests are every bit as strong for England which is generally considered Home.

I will post this on arrival in Sydney, so you must await further descriptions in my next package. Mary sends you a postcard of our fine ship, and a pretty fair sketch of a dolphin.

With much affection from us both,

To all the family in Leicester,

Teddy and Mary

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After Sydney, Mary felt a jolt of anticipation as she knew the long distant family her aunt had spoken of so frequently, especially her Aunt Nancy who had sent all those Christmas boxes, was to meet them in just a week’s time. She crossed off the last dates on her journal eagerly and helped Pa pack up all the little household objects they had fashioned along the way. By now there were doors, windows and a mantelpiece, besides the furniture and figures; all to scale, awaiting installation in the model house.

Pa knew lots about New Zealand buildings, but he could not enlighten her about the age and condition of Aunt Nancy’s house. . . . All he knew was that the family lived on an island near Auckland, reached by a ferry steamer, and on a farm that had horses and cattle and sheep. ‘Best of all,’ he told her, ‘there are two cousins, not much older than you, who will be keen to show you and me around. We will have to do all we can to help them all on the property. It is very kind of them to have us to stay.’

So on the day of their arrival in Auckland Mary consulted her fob watch, set Matilda aloft on her hand luggage and prepared to walk down the gangway into her new life.

Part II

Waiheke Island,

New Zealand

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The Arrival

June 1913

First light on a small island in Auckland’s Hauraki Gulf: the green grass and trees shining with the morning dew on them that always burnt off within the hour. Sounds of tui and kereru, bellbirds and fantails playing in the pale pink perfect sky, above the slow wash of the little waves down in the beach where the new wharf jutted out into the bay. A moored dinghy bumped it gently and far out on the horizon a single red triangle announced the arrival of the scow, due in from Auckland City to collect another cargo of manuka firewood. No other sign of life this summer morning as Nancy gazed through the bedroom window of the single storied farmhouse.

Her father-in-law had built it of heart kauri forty years ago when the great trees still towered almost untouched over the native bush that covered the whole island. The scent of kauri resin came through the papered walls in the parlour, along with the ghost of wood smoke from the open winter fire. A traditional villa, it had a hipped roof of red corrugated iron, two wide verandas facing the sea and the track, with airy square high-ceilinged rooms on either side of the hallway. A lean-to kitchen and scullery were at the rear of the house where a cluster of tarpaper-roofed outbuildings jostled against each other, put up at various times to do duty as storerooms, cowsheds and bunk rooms for shearers.

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Nancy was expecting her English visitors any day now. They had not been aboard the Friday steamer, not due again till Tuesday next, but they may have found passage on the approaching scow.

Her sister Agnes had written several letters giving her their ship’s departure dates, along with the real news of Teddy’s betrayal by Mary’s mother Alice, alongside the edited account that must be given to Mary, who had been told that her mother needed to stay behind. It all sounded preposterous to Nancy, whose early romance with Jonty had been long eclipsed by the realities of subsistence farming with a young family.

She had never met any of Agnes’ extended English family, though knew of all their doings from her sister’s monthly letters. She had some sympathy for Teddy’s impatience with the office work of the mill, his woodcarving skills, and his tenderness for his only child. Agnes said that Mary was very wise and clever for her eight years and that she missed the child badly. It would be good to have a youngster in the house again now her girls were nearly grown.

Now, where was she to find beds for them? Cassie, her youngest, overgrown at fourteen, would simply have to make the best of sharing her room with Mary, because sister Helen’s old iron hospital bed was lying empty since she had moved to Auckland to board. Cassie would have to sort out her great pile of dumped clothing and bags and

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have a proper clear out before making it up with the best bedding and a couple of dolls Mary would enjoy.

As for Teddy, rumoured to be a drinker with a short fuse; he would be best quartered in the shearer’s shed, as far as possible from her husband, who was not disposed to be indulgent to these English city folk.

She registered the creak of bedsprings as Jonty rose and joined her at the window, putting his arm comfortably around her shoulder. They watched as the scow worked its way slowly across the bay. It would arrive in under an hour now. For the past week they had waited to see if their guests were aboard any visiting boat, and he was deeply apprehensive that the newcomers would disturb a lifestyle he loved and worked for fiercely, that had absolutely no need of outsiders.

‘As long as he can chop firewood and help with feeding out …’ Jonty told her, in a tone that clearly showed he doubted Teddy could even do that.

‘He is a fine woodcarver, I hear,’ Nancy replied, taking his hand and putting it to her lips. Her husband snorted in contempt.

‘Let him go and watch old Wiremu if he wants to see proper woodcarving then, but I will expect some serious farm work out of him while he stays here. How long are they planning to visit anyway?’

‘A year was mentioned, dear, you know, but not all of it with us, I’m sure. And there’s always the fear of war breaking out in Europe. That could change their plans.’

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‘I hope he’s not planning to duck out of his patriotic duties if it comes to war. He’ll find our New Zealand as loyal a territory as Leicestershire! And he can join the Territorials for now. I don’t want it thought that I’m harbouring shirkers.’ Jonty harrumphed his way into his working clothes and went out to feed the chooks.

Later, over breakfast with a yawning Cassie, Nancy said, ‘Can I have another look at Teddy’s postcard?’

The colour tinted picture of the SS Athenic liner was stuck in the mirror frame over the fireplace; its reverse covered in Teddy’s cramped scrawl.

‘Postmarked Australia Monday 1st June,’ observed Nancy as she read it through again. ‘They will never arrive here from Sydney inside a week surely. Wait!’ As Jonty reached for it, she turned it over again to see the front.

‘Look what he’s written up the side of the picture – WHITE FLAG SIGNALS ARRIVAL NOT SURRENDER. He must be planning to run up a ship’s flag.’

‘Well, that is intelligent, I admit,’ her husband conceded as, tea in hand, he moved out onto the veranda to peer again at the incoming boat.

‘Well, we should run ours up so they know where we are! Cassie, run and get the red ensign will you, out of the locker on the back veranda.’

As his big daughter dropped her toast and ran off he asked, ‘Is that a white flag above the red sail there?’

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Nancy went out to look then too, but could see nothing but a seagull atop the scow. Cassie was back in no time, lit up with excitement as her father hastily knotted the old New Zealand ensign and hauled it up the flagpole on the corner of the porch. It was Cassie who noticed the second boat, a cutter, moving faster than the scow towards the wharf. And that boat was indeed carrying a white flag. She could make out the long strips of sleeves of a shirt doing flag duty, fluttering bravely from the top mast of the boat, now clearly visible in the harbour.

‘That’s Frank Barradale’s boat,’ cried Jonty. ‘How the devil did they get aboard that?’

He was thrilled as well as nervous now at the prospect of meeting these foreign relations from the other side of the world.

‘You’ve just got time to make Mary’s bed,’ Nancy told Cass, ‘while I put a batch of scones in the oven.’

As she absently rubbed the butter into the flour she had several thoughts at once. He’s betting his shirt on this move, poor man. It is a sort of surrender. I fear there will be trouble ahead. But nothing this family can’t handle.

Then her heart jumped at the thought of the letter Teddy would surely bring from Agnes, and all the news she would soon have for her in reply.

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Mary and Teddy came into the harbour at daybreak, both silenced by the magic of the pink dawn above the wooded hills of the island. They had been fortunate with the travel arrangements. The Sydney harbourmaster connected them with a ship about to leave for Auckland and a porter moved all their baggage aboard just two hours before departure. The eight trunks were labelled for collection from the Auckland Freight office. Teddy gave him a tip to post the postcard he had written aboard ship, and on impulse wrote a cryptic message on the front.

Only three days later, they stood together at the bow of the 28 foot cutter Glengarry, privately owned by a Scottish gentleman, hugely tall, and bound for his own jetty at Woodside Bay. He was their new friend Frank, now at the wheel, as they all drank hot sweet tea. The men were smoking small cheroots and Mary was sucking a peppermint.

Teddy had met him in the Auckland Harbourmaster Hotel bar the evening before, and told him some of his story. Of course Jonty Cadwallader’s farm was well known on Waiheke and so Frank insisted on sailing them over and dropping them off on the way round.

‘Only problem is I leave at midnight to catch the tide,’ said Frank, ‘but I have a fine crew aboard to steer while we get a few hours shuteye.’

So Teddy bought Frank another whisky and in high good humour they settled the bill. He then woke Mary so gently that she thought she was still dreaming as he carried

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her, wrapped in blankets, across Quay St and onto the elegant cutter. She fell back asleep as soon as he tucked her up in the forecabin, and then Teddy flung himself fully clothed on the other bunk and passed out.

‘That must be the place,’ he told his daughter now, as they rounded a promontory and a jetty with a small group of buildings came into view.

‘And they’ve put out the flags for us!’

At that he remembered the message he had added to his postcard, and cried, ‘We need to run up a white flag!’

‘Nothing of that nature on this ship,’ replied Frank. ‘We never surrender on the Glengarry.’

‘Use your shirt, Pa,’ said Mary, ‘and quickly!’

‘Oh, you’re a one, Miss Mary,’ said Frank. ‘I can see who’s running this enterprise.’

So Teddy pulled off his coat and scarf and waistcoat, hauled off his grubby shirt over his shoulders and followed Frank’s orders as to which halliard to attach it from. Soon his shirt was flapping wildly at the top of the mast.

‘What a motley crew we look now,’ said their skipper. ‘Pity you didn’t wash it first, it’d dry in half an hour.’

They were just in time, for Mary could now see tiny figures waving excitedly on the distant wharf.

‘It’s worked!’ she shouted, ‘We’ve made it. That must be Aunt Nancy!’

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And suddenly she began to cry, great gulping sobs of relief and exhaustion. Now they were nearly at the end of their two month journey, she was overwhelmed with all the homesickness for her dear familiar Leicester life that she had refused to admit all this time.

But the wharf was clearly fast approaching; she could make out two women now beside a big man who must be her Uncle Jonty. Mary wiped her face hastily with her hankie, and looked up.

‘Do I look all right, Pa?’

Just like her mother, Teddy thought painfully, and near breaking down himself. Then he answered, as he always had to Alice, ‘Gorgeous, my darling. You’re going to knock ’em dead.’

Frank brought the cutter up deftly to the Matiatia wharf and Jonty readied himself to catch the painter.

‘I’ve a couple of stowaways for you, Jonty!’ the skipper cried cheerfully.

Nancy and Cassie and Teddy and Mary gazed at each other wordlessly across the water. A new family life was forming for all of them from this moment.

So this is where all our Christmas boxes come from! thought Mary. And how like Agnes she is, thought Teddy

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with relief as he gazed at Nancy who was carrying a bundle of scones in a napkin.

‘Thank you neighbour!’ Nancy called out to Frank. ‘Will you come ashore?’ When he shook his head no, she passed him the bundle while Jonty carefully helped Mary ashore and Teddy gathered their little bags and climbed up onto the planks himself.

‘Ah... breakfast! Just what I need!’ responded Frank, as his men pushed the boat off again, heading for his own bay further around the island.

‘We are very much obliged to you,’ shouted Teddy, as Mary waved her thanks.

‘We must meet again soon!’ But Frank barely waved as he attended to manoeuvring his boat back out of the bay.

And only then did the five of them turn to formally meet each other. Jonty shook Teddy’s hand heavily, staring hard into the Englishman’s face. He saw a tall thin, crumpled mournful man, his brown eyes red rimmed this morning, with bushy brows, pockmarked cheeks and three days growth of beard. Teddy ruefully smiled as he sized up his sunburnt burly adversary in the battered Akubra hat.

‘I’m afraid I present a woeful spectacle sir, but I thank you heartily for giving us lodgings. This is my daughter Mary.’

Mary had already hugged her aunt and cousin, and now came to stand by her father and shake hands with

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Jonty. She stood so straight-backed, small and fierce that the big man’s heart melted.

‘Come into the house at once!’ called Nancy, already hurrying up the path to the kitchen. ‘Let’s get some breakfast into you and then hear some of your adventures. You are both so welcome to join our family and I can’t wait to hear news of Agnes and of the whole world you have sailed through!’

Cassie thought Mary looked like a china doll, so tiny, with such formal garments, that she picked her up and swung her round by way of greeting, and then took her by the hand to their bedroom and showed her where she would sleep. The spare bed was still heaped with clothing, but Mary was grateful to see a bright room with books and toys familiar to her from England, and glad that this big girl was to be her friend. She was shown the wash room and the privy, and then they both went through to the big kitchen to feast on bacon and scrambled eggs and hot scones washed down with cups of tea.

They talked of how they met Frank, and Jonty told Teddy that Frank was a wealthy bachelor with a house in Sydney that he often travelled to by boat. Not a family man, and certainly not a farmer.

Teddy had noticed the army uniform hanging in the washhouse and asked, ‘Is he a soldier then?’

‘Yes, a reservist anyway. He leads us in our military training ops twice a week!’

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That sounds ominous, thought Teddy, as he nodded respectfully.

But Nancy was asking after Agnes, and so he told her that the letters were in the big boxes still to arrive, with photographs and Teddy’s plate camera and many more treasures.

By way of current news Teddy brought out a three day old copy of the Sydney Morning Herald, with its editorial excoriating the British Trades Union strikers. He promised to take many more pictures of the family and the island to send back in the next Christmas box. Mary ran and found her tiny leather bound photo frame with the picture of the family on the lawn, taken so recently and yet a lifetime away.

‘Whose is the terrier?’ Nancy asked studying the picture closely.

‘Barker is mine,’ Mary said, ‘Grandpa William is walking him till I get back.’

Then she told them of the doll’s house furniture they had made aboard ship.

‘Pa will make a doll’s house like his mother Isabella’s house to put it all in, as soon as his tools arrive.’

‘And after you have put me to work…,’ added Teddy hastily, ‘I can ride and shoot and chop wood, and will gladly swap the Leicester office for some outdoor work. My father wishes me to meet Auckland corn merchants also, with a view to trading some milling machinery.’

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‘First up, you must take your medical,’ Jonty told him.

‘Whatever for? I’m not the world’s fittest chap but I can hold my own as a woodchopper at least!’ cried Teddy.

‘It’s for the Territorials … since 1911 here, all men over eighteen deemed fit must enlist in the Reserve Force and undertake part time training.’

‘My God, I’m a bit over eighteen, Jonty. I’m over forty!’

‘Well - I doubt you’ll be called up for the Expeditionary Force, but you are quite fit to man the defences here on Waiheke if it should come to that. God knows I hope it doesn’t, but those generals in Germany seem hell bent on picking a fight, and we of our New Zealand Dominion are proud members of the British Empire. It’s only twice a week and you can lead the Mounted Rifles!’

Teddy hoped his face did not betray any trace of alarm as he agreed heartily that he would find that good fun, as soon as he could procure himself a mount. Jonty kept his thoughts on shirkers to himself for now, and nobody spoke of Alice.

Nancy had a small pile of letters from France addressed to Mary that she planned to keep to herself until the child was settled and until she had learnt more of Teddy’s frame of mind.

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Island Life

July 1913

The next six weeks passed busily as the days grew shorter and cooler in the antipodean winter. Squalls blew up, hampering the unloading of the trunks that arrived on the scow, and the ceremonial introductions to all the people and customs of the island made Mary think of Christmas too. They sent a telegram to announce their safe arrival and then Mary wrote long letters to Agnes, with notes for Sam and postcards for Clara, and sketches of their new home and the jetty. Nancy showed her the French postcards waiting for her from Alice, so the Charlie Toller story came to light. Teddy was very angry at this and forbade Mary to write back, so that all had to be done discreetly.

Mary still adored her glamorous mother, admired Alice even now for her romantic recklessness, but was secretly relieved to be out of the way. She was definitely on Pa’s side in this affair and never wanted to have to meet her mother and Charles together. Maybe it would all be forgotten by the time they returned to England, she told Matilda, as they stared out of the top bedroom window together.

She started school for the first time in her life, riding behind Cassie for the half hour journey on the big shaggy farm horse, which grazed with the others till two o’clock when the seventeen pupils were dismissed. The school

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building was of sturdy weatherboard with a steep pitched kauri shingle roof. The pupils gathered in a single room full of long double desks, warmed by an open fire in winter. Mr. Grey taught them the three R’s (Reading, wRiting and aRithmatic) and the Rev. Gilfillan, the visiting Anglican minister, took them for Religious Studies on Wednesday mornings. Miss Herald arrived with the portable organ and led them all in hymn-singing after lunch.

At fourteen, Cassie was ready to leave the little island school for a live-in domestic position with a family in Auckland. But she stayed on now as a pupil teacher, inspired by her new friend Mary, and her boxes of books. At home, Mary showed Cassie the countries of the world in her big atlas, with the route they had travelled from Liverpool, and then Cassie, with surprising aplomb, lectured the class in geography, using the big old world maps they found in the storeroom.

‘Aunt Agnes would be proud of us!’ said Mary, ‘teaching longitude and latitude from the other side of the world!’

The children marvelled at the amount of sea around New Zealand, bright pink on the chart like the rest of the grand British Empire. The pink bits took up half the map. To think that they were all ruled from such a distant pair of islands, no bigger than New Zealand. Their own island was too small to even feature on the World Map, an omission that so distressed some of the pupils that Mary

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and Cassie copied the bays and tracks of Waiheke in chalk onto the blackboard, and had each child mark in their own home.

Meanwhile Teddy set up his photography studio in the corner of the farm woolshed and duly recorded the views, buildings, boats and characters on the island. One grand day, attended by the full roll in their Sunday best, he rode over to the school with Nancy in the cart, carrying the cumbersome photographic equipment, to record the year’s intake for posterity.

Mr. Grey fussed about with a wash cloth, lining everybody up and polishing the grubbier faces. Many parents turned up too, to his exasperation, but Teddy cheerfully opted to do several shots, with and without the extra support, and promised Alan Grey a framed portrait of the version that had the teacher sitting sternly centre front, surrounded by his unnaturally solemn flock, in front of the little school.

News of unrest in the Balkans reached them from sporadic journals and letters from home. Territorial camps were set up in preparation for the war rumoured to be imminent in Europe, for which the men of this loyal Dominion at the end of the earth were determined to be prepared. Locally, an organised Territorial Force arose on the island, of which Frank took charge, distributing uniforms and job titles like a natural born general. Frank viewed human nature as designed to fight.

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‘War made England great,’ he insisted, ‘we had to fight the Maoris for this land, but they all like the guns and blankets of civilisation now. Best thing is to keep out of the front line wherever possible!’

It all seemed like play acting to Teddy who at forty-two was exempt from enlisting. But to avoid the white feather shirker label he took part in the local exercises cheerfully enough and became the battalion photographer, developing small group prints for each man to carry and larger ones to be framed at home.

Teddy was soon swept up into the game despite himself. He acquired a horse and dutifully practised twice a week in the Mounted Rifles (of which there were three, not counting Frank). Though Teddy disapproved of glorifying war and had no intention of leaving Mary, he was keen to placate Jonty and enjoyed the horse riding.

Mary watched these exercises with pride mixed with apprehension and so later, in the woolshed, as they considered an old packing case that had contained some of their belongings from Leicester, she asked, ‘Are you going to go to war, Pa?’

‘Not a chance,’ he told her cheerfully. ‘It’s not likely to come to that and even if it does your old pa’s overage. And engaged on work of national importance too, like building this doll’s house.’

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Carving the Pou

August 1913

Wiremu watched the new arrivals from his whare in the old peach orchard, up on the ridge behind the Cadwalladers’ place. The old Maori was eighty-five years old now, and nearly the last of the Ngāti Paoa whānau. His grandson, Rewi, still lived with the old man, part-time anyway, but he was itching to leave with the army, Wiremu knew. His own wife and daughter were dead of the ‘flu epidemic that had swept most of the survivors back to the mainland, but he stubbornly hung on, tending his garden, maintaining a dignified truce with Jonty, the son of his father’s old foe. It involved exchanges of fish, melons and peaches for rum and other medicines, and a rare boat trip to another part of the island. When younger, he had lent a hand on the farm, but never for hire. He was no aged retainer, but a voluntary hermit, guardian of the pou and pounamu and the whakapapa of the tribe; not that there was anyone to tell it to now.

After a week or two he took to appearing in the woolshed to admire Teddy’s set of fine carving tools in their hinged wooden case. They spoke rarely, and chiefly in the universal sign language of carvers. They smoked many pipes of tobacco, sharing and comparing as connoisseurs Wiremu’s home-cured with Teddy’s Dunhill Export Blend. The old man liked to watch the doll’s house

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progress, as Teddy fashioned odd bits of wood into walls and windows, doors and frames....

The toy house was a simpler production than their ideal model of Isabella’s house. It was just the same shape as the packing crate it was created from, with panels inserted to make six rooms, connected by a staircase of matchboxes. The front wall of each room opened separately on piano hinges, while its windows and doors were mere holes. Its pitched roof was clumsily tiled with cardboard strips, printed underneath with the text of the boxes from Leicester their goods had been packed in. But the proportions satisfied Mary and the scale of the rooms fitted well all the little items they had made on their voyage.

Wiremu and Teddy carried it into the front parlour of the farmhouse, and left it to Cassie and Mary to furnish with curtains and rugs. Nancy watched all this approvingly, noting how happy her daughter was these days, as she supplied the girls with various bits and bobs.

One day Rewi appeared at the back door of the farmhouse, in the army uniform he wore all the time these days. He was holding a small carved box.

‘It’s from my old man, for the doll’s house,’ he told Cassie shyly when she opened the door. So she led him through to the parlour so he could admire all the details now installed in the toy house, while Cassie admired Rewi’s lithe body in the serge grey uniform.

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‘You look quite the army man,’ she laughed at him, ‘except for your hair! You’d be court-martialled if you were a real soldier, with those black curls down your back.’

He looked at her fiercely. ‘I want it all off,’ he told her urgently. ‘I don’t know who to ask.’

‘Oh Rewi,’ she answered softly, ‘I’ll cut your hair. Go and get scrubbed up in the horse trough with plenty of soap, and I’ll do it tonight on the veranda.’ He gave her a quick nod of thanks as she saw him out again, though he would not look at her face. ‘Seven o’clock, after tea,’ she called out to his retreating back.

Cassie’s mood was strangely electric when she wandered back into the parlour, and she paid scant attention to Mary’s plans for the box.

‘Look, Cass, it’s just perfect for a chest at the end of the hall staircase. Look at its pretty lid! My grandfather has a chest like this in the hall in Leicester.’

‘It’s a Maori waka huia,’ said Cassie, absently. ‘It’s for precious things, like rings. Ma has one on her dresser in the bedroom.’

But in her mind it was already seven o’clock, and she was standing behind Rewi combing his hair.

Now that the doll’s house was out of the workshop, and his promise honoured, Teddy showed Wiremu the mantelpiece, unwrapping it carefully from its blankets, so that the old man could trace the carved lines of the ropes and features. He chuckled at the story of the millstone and

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the noose, and then nodded at the meaning of the model of Teddy’s mother’s house, of Isabella’s death and of William’s refusal to countenance her hopes for her son’s artistic career. From there, the story of Alice’s elopement and Mary’s brave journey with her father across the world came stumbling out.

The painful story Teddy had never told slid out like a splinter, gently under the Maori’s skilled hands. Robert was the favoured son, always, and William had negotiated this expedition to New Zealand to be rid of Teddy. His father had cast him out, incensed by Isabella’s indulgence of her elder son’s artistic leanings.

So they found themselves both exiles, and before too long Teddy was invited up to view the carvings at Wiremu’s place, and to learn a little of the Maori language. The old pendant of greenstone jade he wore always was called pounamu. A treasure was a taonga, like the ancient carved wooden pieces that sang the long history of his family tree, his whakapapa, and the loneliness of the last of the line.

Teddy felt accepted here in a way he never was in his father’s house, and sensed that by some strange accident he had landed in the right place for once. Here at Wiremu’s he was at ease, his natural self, with his carving skills recognised. Before long he got into the habit of walking up to the whare after the family evening meal to spend an hour or two yarning, sipping rum and smoking tobacco with the old man. They hauled out the mantelpiece and set

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it up against the wall, around the iron range, where it gleamed darkly. Teddy was not proud of it any more. It was clever but evil, and painful to him now to remember the rage and frustration that drove him to carve it, only a year before.

After several such evenings, Wiremu took him through to a lean-to at the rear of the dark smoky room, with a bench built along the back wall and tarpaulins roughly hung on the outsides. A long draped figure was laid out at chest height on a table hewn from a tōtara slab propped on trestles of pōhutukawa wood. Teddy started in shock, and the old man spluttered with chuckles.

‘He’s not dead! He’s not even finished yet!’ And with that he snatched off the dusty sailcloth to expose a huge half carved piece of timber.

‘My father cut this tree down, and dressed it and marked out the pattern, and entrusted me to finish it. I have been meant to be working on it these twenty years now, and I don’t know when I last opened him up. Young Rewi’s not keen. He’s a fighter not a carver. I’m hōhā to think I’ll go myself before the work is done. I took up with the rum after Hera and Emare died, she was Rewi’s mother, and the ‘flu took both women within two months. Didn’t seem to be any point in keeping going after that.’

The surface of the dressed tōtara was covered in charcoal tracing, patterns for the carving yet to be done. The top third was completed, in intricate swirls of lines and spirals, of an elegant and archaic Polynesian design

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that thrilled the Englishman to the bone. He had seen such work in the Leicester Museum, and also on the carving Nancy had sent him that last Christmas. Had that come from Wiremu?, he wondered now.

Teddy ran his hands over the rough edges, awed at the prospect of working on such a grand design. It would take months of patient work, but it would be a welcome challenge and an honour to learn from such a master. What a huge tree it must have been.

Not many of these rangatira left standing now, Wiremu told him. Mostly shipped to Auckland for ship and house building. Now he’s down we need to honour his passing, and plant him upright again as a fine pou.

‘You’d have to teach me what the lines are,’ said Teddy, ‘and I’ll gladly finish it with you. It is astonishing how sharply you’ve made the grooves, with your greenstone adzes, but I can make quicker work of it with these chisels here.’

Wiremu said, ‘My father used this old broken bayonet, he reckoned it was the only tool he needed. But before you hoe into it, you need to learn some respect for tradition, boy. This carving space is tapu. No alcohol. That’s why it lies there unfinished, because I’ve lost my mana for the task, since I lost my family one after another. I took to the booze after that, for ten years or so.’

‘No women in this space, not even your little daughter. No dark thoughts while you carve. This pou is to stand

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where that stone is, to be a marker of past whānau and a bridge for those yet to come.’

Teddy was taken aback at the idea of abstinence from alcohol, a habit he had depended on for comfort since he was fifteen.

‘Must I take the pledge for ever?’ he asked, thinking of his monthly visits to Frank, and the pleasure of a cold beer with the conscripts after a day’s territorial drill.

Wiremu chuckled again.

‘It wouldn’t do us any harm to lay off it altogether of course, but I reckon we can make the rules for ourselves now. Let’s say no alcohol in our systems when we carve, that’d mean not the night before. But weekends, away from the carving space, that’s a different affair.’

‘Tobacco permitted?’ asked Teddy, bargaining like a dealer at a horse fair.

‘Damn right,’ the old man replied. ‘And all the cups of tea we can drink.’

‘You’re on,’ said Teddy then and, straightening up his shoulders he faced the sunset aflame over the bay and made his vow.

‘I hereby pledge to complete this taonga under Wiremu’s instruction. Furthermore, I will forswear all alcohol while I am carving it.’

Then Wiremu put his hands on Teddy’s shoulders, drew him close and stared fiercely into his eyes.

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‘This is a hongi,’ the old man told him, as he put his forehead to Teddy’s and pressed their noses together. They stayed still for a steady minute there inhaling each other’s breath, and then they moved apart and the old man put the kettle back onto the range.

‘Time for another cup of tea, I reckon,’ he said.

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War

August 1914

One year later Teddy and Jonty rode over the smallholding to collect the mail from Putiki Bay. There was a small crowd outside the little house used as the Post Office, among whom they spotted Frank. The news had just arrived by telegraph of England’s declaration of war on Germany, because the Kaiser had just invaded neutral Belgium. Feelings ran high at the scent of combat, and for the defence of the British Empire and several men looked closely at Teddy. Three men under forty signed up for the Force on the spot, and ran home to pack for their journey to Trentham for training. One of the enlisters was Alan Grey, the schoolmaster, who looked older than Teddy but told them he was thirty-five. He would be a great loss to the island.

‘My God, I’m ready to serve too,’ he declared.

Teddy shook his hand. ‘I’d go with an Expeditionary Force tomorrow if they’d have me but I’m overage, and I have a young daughter I’m responsible for. Good luck to you sir! I can take over at the school for now anyway.’

Frank clapped him on the back heartily. ‘You’ve become a fine member of the Mounted Rifles, my boy. I expect you’ll be off yourself, soon. Wish I could come with you, but I’m nearly fifty; I think I’ll go over to Sydney and try my luck there if this country can’t use me.’

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Young Rewi was grinning with his two mates; they all had military haircuts now and they stabbed at the air with imaginary bayonets. Nobody knew their exact birth dates though Teddy guessed they were well under eighteen. Anyone could see there would be no stopping them now.

Teddy was secretly horrified at the prospect of enlisting, and not just of leaving Mary behind. He had no illusions as to the glory of war; indeed, his sympathies were with the conscientious objectors. He recalled wryly the old Trades Union slogan ‘A bayonet is a weapon with a worker at each end’ but knew better than to voice those opinions in this company. He also suspected Frank’s plan to go to Sydney would never result in his enlistment, but rather serve to avoid accusations of shirking from the men he had trained with such bravado over the last twelve months.

‘That school mastering will be a fine job for you!’ Jonty told him as they rode home together. ‘Mary and Cassie are already improving the school lessons, and you can teach them the history of England, and make all sorts of wooden blocks and gadgets to help them learn better. You are much needed here for now. But Mary will always be safe with Nancy and me, you know, she’s settled right in. You can go and do your bit when required and then we’ll see you both safely back to England when all this blows over. I don’t reckon this war will last long beyond next Christmas.’

Privately this war news threw Teddy into a quandary; perhaps they would be safest to travel home to

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Leicestershire at once? When he travelled to Auckland later that week to purchase supplies, he enquired about tickets back to England, only to learn that all the Cruise Liners had already been requisitioned. He could even see the SS Athenic, their old ship, docked in the boatyards, getting a coat of grey paint as she was converted into a troop ship. They were going to be here longer than a year now he realised, till this damn war was over. He needed a drink badly at this thought, but was still pledged to stay sober while he carved the pou with Wiremu. So he climbed up the hill again, through the leafless peach trees to the whare, to have a cup of tea with the old man. He found no sympathy for his fears there.

‘There comes a time in every man’s life when he has to stand and fight, boy, and you could make a fine soldier. Young Rewi has no idea of the odds against him. You are braver than him because you are older and wiser and with more to lose. The life suits you out here. You have grown strong and healthy in your mind as well as your body.

‘But it may be your last chance to prove yourself as a warrior,’ said Wiremu. ‘Your daughter will be safe here. You can leave her and Cassie to run the school. The first thing is to finish this carving. This tree was five generations old when it was gathered and I want this pou to outlast us all by another five.’

Vita brevis, thought Teddy, ars longa. ‘I thought I had nothing to live for but Mary when I came out here, but I

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have found much happiness now. Whoever would have guessed that I’d become a schoolteacher?’ he replied.

‘I love this little island and all you islanders. Mary is a brave girl and will cope well with whatever comes up. She is probably safer on Waiheke Island than anywhere in England. I have enjoyed making all those photographs she can keep in an album, and I have finished her doll’s house. I may find myself enlisting in this stupid war after all but never fear, I will finish this carving with you, and write and make peace with my father too.’

With that the two men lit a pipe each and took their mugs of tea through to the carving shed and put in three straight hours on the pou before sunset. The top figure was completed now, carved from the top of the heavy tōtara pole. His hair was pulled into a topknot, his slanted eyes were inlaid with pāua, and spiral moko patterns covered his stern face. A tiki hung round his neck and he held a mere in one three-fingered hand. His feet stood on the shoulders Teddy was carving out for the second figure, of the same size but in European clothing. In one hand this figure held a mug of tea, and he stood tall, smiling, at ease. In the triangle of space made by his trousered legs was sketched a tall thin house, to depict Isabella’s House. It was an icon that connected his mother to his daughter, and stood for his English heritage.

‘Where do you plan to put this thing up?’ Teddy asked the kaumātua, as they tapped away.

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‘Never got that far as to picture it even finished,’ was the answer.

‘But I reckon now you are to be in charge of the school, that it should stand there. Plenty of my mokopuna there to admire it, and your Pākehā carving at the bottom will mean a lot to Mary and your lot. It will stand for the friendship between us.’

‘Yes, that’d be grand,’ said the new school teacher, ‘and we can install it as a farewell to old Alan, and I will make him a photograph of us all beside it!’

Teddy spoke to Jonty and Nancy next. ‘Now we are at war, I worry about my daughter. I wish I had never brought her all this way now it is so difficult to return.’

‘You can trust us with her life,’ replied Nancy. ‘We love her as our own now. Cassie thinks she is a sister. Whatever happens we will care for her well and get her back to England when the time comes. Maybe Cassie can go with her? We don’t want to lose you, but we think you ought to go to war if the call should come.’

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So, over their evening meal, Mary learnt that England had declared war on Germany and that New Zealand men were already enlisting for the Expeditionary Force.

‘Your young friend Rewi is ready to go tomorrow,’ Teddy told a blushing Cassie. ‘I’m just an old man, but I can still be useful defending the country this end. I will take over from Mr. Grey at your school because he’s off too. And I can run the Territorials. There will be a need for manpower when all the young have left for the front...’

‘Is war declared in Leicester too?’ Mary wanted to know.

‘All over the western world, dear, I’m sorry to say, but I doubt there will be much change at Empire Road,’ Nancy told her.

‘Or here on the island, in fact,’ added Jonty. ‘The biggest difficulty will be moving between countries. Much fighting will take place at sea and there will be great danger to shipping. Safest to stay put for now.’

Mary sat and digested this news. She would be proud to have her Pa running the classroom, although it meant a longer time away from her mother and her beloved Grandpa and Aunt Agnes. She decided to write them a long letter as soon as she and Cassie had washed up.

Up in his whare, Wiremu watched as the farmhouse windows turned kerosene yellow. Out in the bay, the waves rolled endlessly onto the shore.

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Casualties

September 1915

The first news of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign came through in newspaper reports as the wounded returned. New Zealand infantry troops, once forty thousand strong, had suffered eight thousand casualties. Rewi, who had been training in Egypt with the Maori battalion before transfer to Anzac Cove, returned looking ten years older and missing an arm. He told them horrible tales of the misery at the front, of landing in the wrong place, in a boat half full of water, pelted by shrapnel. His chief praise was for the NZ Medical Corps, whose courage had certainly saved his life.

Then came a letter from William in Leicester lambasting the foolishness of generals and the terrible waste of war. Teddy’s brother Robert had enlisted after all, only to be gassed in France. He was invalided out and was back now at the mill, but with grave fears for his health. Teddy’s heart went out to his golden younger brother, now fatally damaged. He began to feel an urgency to do something himself.

He knew he could not stop the war, and he remained staunchly pacifist, but all the tales of courage in exotic locations began to act on his imagination until his simple daily teaching life appeared too tame, even cowardly in these terrible times. The Medical Corps began to appeal as a justifiable reason to join the fray. The thrill of the sheer

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adventure of it all (camels! deserts!) persuaded him to send a letter in his elegant copperplate offering his services to the Medical Corps. His position as a school principal impressed the recruitment officer as much as the handwriting and so it was only a week later that a reply arrived, requesting his appearance at HQ in Trentham.

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A Matter of Conscience

May 1916

Royal Army Medical Corps 13 May 1916

My dear father,

First I thank you for the bundle of letters which arrived last week, despite the difficulties of wartime. We were all absorbed by the quantity of news you have related in six months’ worth of letters. Thank the Lord that you and Agnes remain in good health, and that the mill is able to supply flour from local grain, now that imports are so precarious. I realise now that the business you have set up is indeed an essential service.

I have had plenty of time to think in my two years out in New Zealand, and believe now that my stay here with Nancy’s kind family has taught me more than any university course could have done. I was an angry young man, and absorbed in self-pity when I left you. I felt I was cut out for finer things than the pedestrian routine of the business and that the world owed me a living; in short, I was a snob.

In fact it was your generosity and forbearance that kept me employed at a salary I hardly deserved. It was a sinecure that enabled me to marry Alice and produce our wonderful daughter Mary, who has been such a joy to us all over here as in Leicester.

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After farm working for Jonty I have more of an idea what real labour entails for all those men not sheltered by good fortune as I have been. Though I suspect he has worked me more lightly than he might have, the discipline has been sufficient to improve my muscles and my attitude to life.

I have become friends with Wiremu also; he is an old Maori chief, nearly the last of his tribe in these parts and we have helped each other with a carving project he lacked the strength to finish alone, but had the skills to teach me.

Now that pou, as they call a totem pole, stands outside the small schoolhouse that I have been in charge of since the last teacher enlisted in 1914. I have never been happier! Mary and her cousin Cassie are my very able assistants with a roll of seventeen pupils. I can tell they are cheerful in their work too.

But now we come to the reality of this dreadful war. I know and respect your Unitarian beliefs about the idiocy of war in general. But New Zealand’s patriotic support for the British Empire surpasses even England’s, so that any man is labelled a shirker who does not leap to enlist. Jonty is particularly fierce about this, and as seventeen men from our small community have already died at Gallipoli, I have become very conscious of the easy life I enjoy here.

Despite the lunacy of the heads of state, the bravery of the soldiers is astonishing, and stories of their suffering at the front drive me to assist them as best I can. And so I have signed on as a medical orderly, in order to do my bit to save as many men as I can from the carnage that now rages, in Egypt, France and throughout Europe. Thank heaven England is so far spared invasion, but I fear anything may happen. The

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need for me to stay here with Mary begins to look like an excuse.

I do feel Mary will be quite safe and happy here with her Waiheke family. My plan is to return for her and bring her home after my tour of duty and when we have won the war. And then I will be grateful for a job at the mill, and for the peace and prosperity which none of us will take for granted ever again.

Your loving son,

Teddy

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A Legacy

June 1984

Oh, those long letters... we were all good correspondents in those days.

When I got back to Empire Road in 1919, Agnes showed me the piles she had collected and bound in ribbon, one for each year. . . . I have brought them back with me to browse through again all these years later and they stir up such powerful emotions that I have to frequently put them down and go out into the clear fresh air.

1915 was a fine year for our island community. Pa was happy as a schoolmaster and made all kinds of improvements to the room and its furnishings. Rewi and three others went off to be soldiers and Cassie and I helped more at school until she got very heavy with Rewi’s child. My, what a palaver that caused. Poor Rewi never returned from his second tour of duty; but the boy was born, and Wiremu gave Cassie all his taonga for him, and wept with joy.

The next year, darling Pa enlisted and left for Egypt. He refused to take a horse, said he had too much respect for them to put them through that madness. He went as a medical orderly. He joked that he would become a camelier and did indeed send us back a picture of him atop a big old camel, in full dress he borrowed from a member

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of the Imperial Camel Corps. We framed that picture and hung it in the parlour.

The telegram came the next April, with the news of his death in action, and I was enormously proud of him through my misery. He had become a hero and was much missed. The pou was put up outside the school and became a memorial to Teddy and all the others who later died in those terrible years.

And poor Alice lost her Charlie, and was left with two girls I came to love well …

When I returned to Empire Road, Agnes poured my tea from the camel teapot and I realised why Pa had sent us that camel photograph. It was his best story.

Ah, here is a battered print of it, with his big smile large as life. Through my window the pou stands strong against the sky.

Now where was I?

Must have dropped off for a minute …

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the cicadas are loud today and the sun is low

the family must all be out that’s good

I don’t feel like talking

in fact a quick dart of fear

not fear - adrenalin

I think I may be slipping away

very gently not to worry

everything is tidy now

I can hear the old house creaking in the sun

Pa told me the iron roofing heats up and expands

and that’s the tinging noise

Isabella’s house is very beautiful

and Richard will remember making all those things for it

as I remember working with Pa

and the little story will be published soon

and Genevieve will sort all that out

I must say I never thought I’d end my days back here

in this land I felt an exile in so long

but there you are

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once you’ve lived in two countries

you never can call either one home

there’s always something you want in the other one

I have good friends and family both ends

and they will be sorry not to say goodbye

but you can’t be everywhere

when you get to my age

you must always mean it when you say goodbye

and as Alice said

we will always be close darling wherever we are

Alice is around here somewhere

I may be on the plane again about to take off

what a comfort it always is

anything I have forgotten is too late to go back for now

so never mind

I can buy another or manage without

I feel so full of goodwill for everyone

floating off on a cloud of it

Isabella’s House – A Short Guide

by Mary Page, 1984 $2

Isabella’s House is a model of a real house. It was made

in 1914 by Teddy Palfreyman on Waiheke Island for his

daughter Mary, to describe the home where he had lived as a

child with two brothers and three sisters, his mother

Isabella and his father William and several servants, on an

estate in Leicestershire.

This house was built in 1760 in the Palladian style,

with grand steps and a portico outside and a big staircase

leading up from the hall. The best rooms were at the front,

overlooking the rolling Wolds, with children and servants

fitted in around the back.

The three boys slept in one room and the three girls

next door (luckily there were three of each). They had

breakfast and sometimes lunch with their parents in the

formal dining room. When Isabella was out, the cook fed them

lunch in the kitchen, and sometimes gave them cold meats and

pies to take on their excursions, although (she told them it

would cost her her station) this was strictly not allowed.

Most of the time they lived in the nursery, in the grand

front upstairs room with the window overlooking the drive.

There was a Noah’s Ark, a rocking horse, a little chest of

drawers full of tiny carved toys, and shelves up to the

ceiling laden with books, albums of stamps and photographs,

and sketchbooks of drawings from European tours.

They ate their supper here and did their lessons with a

succession of nannies and governesses, while keeping an eye

on the carriages and visitors on horseback who arrived, on

business or pleasure, to visit Isabella and William.

Sometimes these visitors were brought upstairs to admire the

children so a hurried tidy up was required, and a sense of

reprieve felt at their departure.

Beneath the nursery was the drawing room, where Isabella

played her grand piano. Teddy loved music and learnt to play

the best of all the children. He was a sickly child and

spent more time than the others with his mother. He amused

her with his caricatures, and made working model carts and

animals from wood. These were arranged on the Turkey carpet

and driven around the legs of the padded chairs. A game of

patience lay in progress on the low table, and an embroidery

frame stood, with its half-sewn tapestry on its way to join

the completed cushions on the chaise lounge.

The dining room was the other large ground floor room,

with the long oval mahogany table set for ten. There were

silver candlesticks and cutlery and a centrepiece of china

flowers, placed on white linen under the Minton blue and

white china. On the heavy sideboard was an oil lamp, fruit

and nut bowls, and the covered cheese dish. In the corner,

by the long sash window, stood the big parrot cage, its door

open so that Archibald, the macaw, could fly up to the

curtain pelmet, and join the dinner party after the ladies

had retired.

The kitchen was a warren of smaller rooms: pantry,

scullery, boot room and laundry all leading off the main

room with its scrubbed wooden table and lines of shelves.

Outside the back door stood a cattle trough full of mint,

and a big tree full of cooking apples, sour and fizzy when

cook sliced them for pies and for the children to suck on.

The bathroom was high, cold and white tiled, with a huge

enamel bath that sometimes ran brown with rust, and a water

closet with chain flush.

Mary and her father travelled to New Zealand in 1913.

Teddy worked on the farm, carved a Maori pou, ran the local

school, and then enlisted in the New Zealand Medical Corps

and was killed on active service in Egypt. Mary lived with

her Aunt Nancy’s family till she was sixteen when her aunts

came to bring her back to England. Much later, one of Mary’s

sons settled in New Zealand, and it was his son, Richard who

restored the house for the museum.

Glossary of Maori Words

hōhā exasperated, ashamed

hongi press noses in greeting

kaumātua elder

kauri tall native tree

kereru native pigeon

kororā little blue penguin

mana spiritual power

mere greenstone club

moko tattoo

mokopuna grandchildren

Ngāti Paoa tribal group of area west of the Hauraki Gulf

Pākehā European, non-Maori

pāua NZ abalone

pōhutukawa native red blossomed tree

pou carved pole

rangatira chief

taonga treasure

tapu sacred

tiki carved human figure

tōtara tall native tree

waka huia treasure box

whānau family group

whare house

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to my writers' group here on Waiheke for supporting this story to publication. Janet Salas, Ingrid Scott, Kayla Mackenzie-Kopp, Kathryn Ngapo, Robyne Winton and Vivienne Lingard have all read and critiqued it over the years. We formed Kororā Press to publish the collection Sentries of the Heart in 2014, and now Kororā Press is launching three titles in 2015.

Pauline Frances edited my chapters into a cohesive narrative and Kelly Bickerton contributed some astute proofreading besides the intelligent design layout.

Essential background information has come from the Auckland Maritime Museum and the Waiheke Historical Society.

I owe thanks to the following readers and researchers;

Des Attwell, Judy Cox, Carola Cullum, Lesley Marshall, Paul Monin, Chris Palmer, Tom & Rosie Raines, Lynne Stewart, Sue Walker and Amy West.