Penelope Todd

Nell

Concerning Nell:snow and critters

It’s a bit tricky, watching the fiction of my grandmother’s life become increasingly fictional. Or rather, now the novel is out, seeing her actual life appear in greater detail and clarity. Letters have turned up, and new images, giving new impressions. The letters, written to her daughters, show a woman more socially involved, in later life, than the novel implies. It seems she was forever delivering cakes to friends or family, hosting visitors, or being one herself. Mind you, that’s the kind of impression letters can give when they compress a week’s well-paced activity into a list.

When I did the spit test recently, the DNA evidence brought to light a handful of cousins. One of them, Caroline, sent me these images yesterday. We’re pretty sure that’s young Nell in the cloche hat. In fact, it’s a pretty nice collection of hats. Wading down the Tasman Glacier (we think) with family and friends. Are they up to their chests, or sitting back for the photo? Judging by the tanned faces and forearm (the clincher, it’s so familiar), they’ve been out in the sun or snow-glare for a few days already.

Photo from collection of Caroline Groundwater

This other pic is likely taken at Glen Lyon in the McKenzie country, their uncle’s station. The three older children, my father on the right, each hang onto a duckling or two. The only other connection I can make between Dad and ducks: travelling for his birthday from Otago to Canterbury, I was still puzzling what to give him when we saw a roadside sign: Muscovy Ducklings. I bought two and delivered them in a cardboard box. They free-ranged about the farmlet, and shat daily on the doorstep. I’m pretty sure they were subsequently eaten.

From the collection of Caroline Groundwater

Dad and animals. Besides our pets (guinea pigs, a budgie), we always had chooks, usually a cat, sometimes a dog, and later fattening cattle. For a while, a sheep. We lived beside the springs of a creek in Christchurch. One day a very woolly sheep came running up the creek bed and had to climb out into our garden because this was the end (the source) of the creek. Dad said it must have fallen off a truck. He found a collar and kept it on a long wire that ran across the unruly back half-acre. Later in the summer, we watched the fleece fall from hand-shears onto a tarpaulin. Later still (Christmas, then January), we ate our way through vast quantities of smoked, aged mutton.

October 16, 2024
Concerning Nell: mushrooming evidence

Long-dormant drawers and box-files are being opened, yielding up photos that bear actual, if blurry, evidence of Nell’s presence in my life. Here’s our family, we the first two kids of five, down from Christchurch, visiting our grandparents’ new-to-them Dunedin house.

Nell holds the author

The aunt I’ve called Flick in the novel was an artist, with an artist’s eye. She would sketch us …

… and make photo portraits. I feel almost shy, meeting this girl again. I’d like to know her better.

Author inspects … spider?

Nell and ‘Floss’ had identical, pale brown VWs: And here is fresh evidence of a visit by one of them to our home in Christchurch. Fruitcake was baked and brought north, but presumably stowed too close to the rear engine. I recall the whiff of petrol in it. Here is confirmation, too, that we really did grow up under, and more often in, the biggest cherry tree you ever saw.

And then there were three.

Memory jogged: Nanny the milking goat had twin kids(but what a job our mother had, tricking us human kids into drinking goat’s milk).

Before they moved to the villa alluded to above, Nell and ‘Herb’ bought a house in Ravensbourne big enough to house their five children, and visitors. The house still exists but, as it’s surrounded now by a huge, impenetrable holly hedge and forest, this photo from the 1950s gives the best view I’ve had of it.

In the following novel excerpt, Nell and Herb are moving to Dunedin after a life in the high and highish country. Nell is weary from three years of minding her mother. I made the turret room octagonal, with horizontal window panels, in keeping with a dream I had long ago. Evidently, that was ambitious. Nevertheless:

1951

‘Mrs Hamilton, please don’t go up there. It’s unsafe.’

            Nell has stepped over the chair tipped as a barrier across the first steps of the winding stairwell. She has climbed over the three rotten treads (inferior wood used here and there; easily remedied). ‘I do so at my own risk’ she tells the property agent. ‘You needn’t follow.’

            He hadn’t wanted her to see this house. He has been fixed on the idea that she wants modern, light and stylish. Which she would like, if there weren’t so much barren ugliness mixed in with the newer homes he’s shown her. Expanses of concrete paving. Banks of conifers. Tiny city kitchens.

            Herb told her about the For Sale sign he’d noticed in passing, here at Ravensbourne, off the beaten track, and she insisted on being brought to see the house once the agent had dragged her through three or four hopeless properties: variously too soul-less, too public, too confining.

            At the top she steps into the octagonal tower room with its eight horizontal window panels looking south into pines, west onto young beeches and elms and north to the swathe of lawn. The whole huge garden is hedged in holly. Nell is magnetised to the eastern windows, with their view of the harbour, shaken by wind, a deep, striated blue between the green hills. She kneels and spreads her elbows along the sill, with sun on her neck and shoulders.

            Downstairs is a thunderously large, dark and ugly kitchen (she’ll paint all the woodwork white), a sprawling living room, chilly green drawing room and six bedrooms, with two cavernous bathrooms. The house is set in its own forest. It’s wildly impractical, but here… This turret is hers. Her bedroom, her dayroom. Here she will be at ease.

            Her mind is made up and Herb will have little choice in the matter.

            ‘Yes,’ she tells the agent. ‘Will you draw up the papers and bring them to us today?’

* * *

Nell was said not to be much of a reader, but the old house is packed with books, and we keep finding copies with her name on the fly leaf. Plus, there’s this:

<3 (heart, right?)

July 29, 2024
Concerning Nell: our altered view

Nell has been out in the world for two months now. Thus far, all feedback has told me that readers find resonance in Nell with their own life, with their mother’s or grandmother’s; with the landscapes Nell inhabits, and with how she thinks and behaves, alone or with her vital others. I like to think that good fiction does this: it gives us readers back to ourselves. We find ourselves mirrored, or jarred or alerted by the story to something in our own make-up, or in the make-up of our world, that brings us a little more wide awake, a little more conscious, if you will.

I’m grateful that this ‘likeness’ is what has most chimed with readers. Any dissonance has been unvoiced, about Nell being conceived on what is now the uncomfortable side of the political blanket. Her grandfather was a colonial land-bagger of the highest order. (Why buy the rights to one high country run if you had the means for three or four?) By 1859, when Joseph Preston turned up, the Crown had bought from Maori, for a pittance per acre, 80% of South Island land. In the mid to late 1800s, men flocked south for the sales.

Joseph and Elizabeth

A Yorkshire wool merchant and miller who did a bit of trading on the way to Aotearoa (of wool, ships, china, clothing and railway fittings, between UK, Australia, Argentina, Canada and South Africa), Nell’s grandfather Joseph travelled down from Nelson soon after his arrival in NZ. Hampered by the need to buy horses, hire a Māori guide and cross the flooded Waitaki River, he was hours late for the Otago sales in Dunedin.

He came across a man who’d bought a ‘depasturing license’ for a run that very afternoon, but was willing sell it on for a hundred pounds’ profit. And so G-g-g’father Joseph came into possession of his first station, Longlands, straddling a good portion of the Pigroot between Palmerston and Ranfurly. Shortly thereafter, he bought 320 freehold acres on the coast, which he named Centrewood. Johnny Jones was said to have been peeved by both purchases, of land he’d coveted for his family, and refused to sell sheep to Joseph to stock his new farms.

Longlands and Centrewwod were only the first of several family acquisitions.

One of my daughters, reading a draft of Nell, asked if some commentary couldn’t be made in the novel about the state of affairs, how the land had been wrested from the Ngāi Tahu people. I pondered this, but decided not to revise history by making my grandmother more ‘woke’ than she was likely to have been. However, exploiting her feyness, I gave her a modicum of discomfort.

Up on the slopes of Mount Buster, she ties the horse and climbs direct to a steep ridge from where she can look down into a shadowy gully. Remnants of bush cling to the sides of a burn that leaps and races from one rocky basin to the next. Nell straddles a tussock and leans into the hill, sensing the hum of its life around her: insects rustle and flicker; a skylark circles, singing, and is joined by a second. Nell lays her head to the hill. Voices. She looks up through feathered grass at the blue sky and keeps very still. They murmur, rise and fall like wind, impossible to decipher male from female, although she is certain she’s hearing a group of adults and children. The exchange grows urgent; all (Nell simply knows) have broken into a run, in pursuit of moa. She sits up straight and crawls back to the vantage point from where any person within audible range will be visible, but of course the hillside, the gully, the slopes to windward, all are empty. Did she fall asleep? Certainly she did not. Nell is stricken. These hills she and Herb have claimed with such ease, and worse, heedlessness; whose feet have known them more intimately than theirs ever will, and where have they gone? That this land has been obtained by the flimsy transfer of numbers and papers is suddenly preposterous. And yet, what can be done about it now that they have a house down, a baby, and all their livelihood invested here?

I feel sure that Nell, ever fair, would be glad to know of the Ngāi Tahu claim and ongoing settlement process.

July 18, 2024
Concerning Nell: the concrete house

The family lived in a tiny cottage nearby while the house was built.

Our grandparents built one of the earliest concrete houses, in the late 1920s. I shudder with cold to think of those dense walls deep-chilled by the Maniototo frost. Here it looks about half done.

As I write this, two (or is it three? they’re ubiquitous) electricians are going from room to room opening plug outlets and light fittings in order to replace the old wiring in our 1915 cottage. To avoid their ever-changing workspace, I likewise go room to room, with the laptop. Doing my best in spite of disruption. I can’t imagine the long disruption of building a whole house. I wrote a scene in Nell from the planning stage:

‘We can make of it what we will,’ Herb tells her. ‘It’s only lines on paper. Look, I’ll spread the plan out. Pencil.’ He waves one at her. ‘Make your adjustments.’ He takes three strides into the centre of the concrete slab and unrolls the plan, pegging it with his glasses case and, after casting fruitlessly around, his hat.

            Nell stands frozen on the edge of the slab. She eyes the car where baby Adam is, thinks of its warm, leathery fug, out of this cutting wind. … Herb wants her to walk about her new home, to envisage their future family eating, washing, playing and bedded down a few inches above this square of concrete. And when she has decided – or agreed, and agreement is what he actually wants because changing the plans will cost precious money – on the layout of its rooms, slab will be added to slab and their concrete house will rise on the rabbity expanse of paddock surrounding it.

            Her breasts are hard: Adam has been asleep for almost three hours and at the thought of him they tighten further and out the milk spurts, filling the folded handkerchiefs in her brassiere.

            …

            Nell pulls her cardigan close and presses with her forearms. He’s not awake yet; she’d hear him wailing through the open car window. So, she goes over and uncurls the bottom of the plan with the tips of her shoes. Elbows to knees, she bends close. She sees at once that the kitchen is too small, and why must the laundry’s only door be to the outside? She draws another into the adjoining hallway. Her pencil seizes a yard and a half of the generous living room for the kitchen. It enlarges windows to the north and west. Her nose drips in the cold and her finger, on wiping the drop, opens a kitchen wall. Why not? She draws in a door (sliding, she writes) and adds a small square onto the large square of the house: a walk-in safe and pantry. Nell arrows the coal range toward an interior wall and adds another kitchen window. She’ll tolerate the lavatory being far closer to the children’s rooms than to her and Herb’s, but she pushes out the corner bathroom’s walls so that the bath can stand free, so that there’s room for a table, a towel rack, a cupboard and children.

            Herb has been pacing out garden fencing and gates. He comes and sketches onto the plan, then peruses Nell’s markings.

            ‘Pricey,’ he says, ‘especially these.’ His forefingers press on the pantry, the enlarged bathroom. ‘They’ll need further foundation.’

            A thin wail comes from the car, then the full bellow.

            ‘If you want me living here,’ Nell’s glance takes in the trampled ground, bulky clouds hiding the hills, her hands chafed and white with cold, ‘these are not for negotiation. Nor the larger kitchen. Nor light from the north.’

June 4, 2024
Concerning Nell: exposure and down

As I drove up to the ‘home’ (I can’t bring myself to say ‘unit’ or ‘hospital’, as found on the signage) where my aunts now live, a small grey critter was trundling back and forth over the expanse of grass — a perpetual lawnmower (I’m told that it alarms the amnesiac residents, who inwardly inhabit the pre-automated era). We see cats riding about on its robo-vacuum equivalent, thanks to Insta. I can’t help thinking how helpful it would be to have a new book fitted with the same mechanism: tiny legs or wheels to convey it about as it noses into this niche or that, sniffing out interest, reporting back, or replicating itself on the spot and exacting money… Getting out and peddling itself, in other words.

I think Nell would have been averse to publicity, although I’ve found one photo of her in the Otago Daily Times, 1960, with her local croquet team (not the pic below). Yet here I am, hawking her about. I have a boxful to sell, I flourish her on emails, paste her face on social media — how strange this scenario would have seemed to someone who never knew a computer.

1913, school Games Committee, Nell top right

Nell had a son who was briefly somewhat famous and whose name is familiar still to climbers in West Otago. As a biochemist, he did promising research on the development of insulin. Academic work didn’t stop him squeezing two Himalayan expeditions into 1954, the year before he completed his PhD. In one with Ed Hilary and fellow Kiwis, he led the first ascent of Mt Baruntse. Then he joined an Oxford University team making a survey of West Nepal. He was the team’s climbing advisor and photographer of flora. The PhD was awarded after his death in 1955 and, thereafter, money was given anonymously for the Colin Todd Memorial Hut to be built on the flanks of Tititea/Mt Aspiring.

Building crew 1960

I’ve made a wide circuit, from aunts and lawn-mowers to mountain huts. Let me see if I can link them up. One of the aunts gave me a 20-below Fairydown sleeping bag for my 21st birthday (made here in Dunedin by Arthur Ellis), a treasured possession that accompanied me four years later when, pregnant and feeling sick most of the time, I was co-warden for the summer with R at the Mt Aspiring Hut. I relished nights in the sleeping bag — for the hours of nausea-free sleep. The other day, emptying cupboards in the old house, I found its replica (if something was worth buying, the aunts bought two, or three or more). Unused, kilos in weight, unbelievably cosy.

I googled and, surprise, up came this exhibit from the Canterbury Museum: Maker: Fairydown
Production date: 1953
Description: One yellow Fairydown brand ‘Twenty Below’ model sleeping bag with a hood. Used by Edmond Hillary during the first ascent of Everest.

Edmond Hillary’s ‘yellow’ Twenty Below

I guess Uncle Colin would’ve had one too. His down jacket appears in the novel, a tragic element.

May 27, 2024
Concerning Nell: Nude on a sofa

There’s a character in Nell I’ve called Ilona. She’s Nell’s sister-in-law, an artist in an era of conformity and mainstream suspicion towards those who devoted themselves to an experimental, creative life. ‘Black sheep’ sums up the family’s early view of her. These days we’re proud of the enormous body of work she produced and of her for breaking with expectation in her mildly ‘wayward’ life. She became one of many centenarians preserved in the cool air of Ōtepoti/Dunedin, and attained 104 years. ‘Ilona’ trained in Christchurch and abroad, and lived itinerantly for many years. I may write more of her later, but for now just this: we found yet-another stash of her work and this unfinished painting-on-wallpaper captivated me for the questions it raised: who, where, in what circumstances?

Nude on a sofa, I E Todd/Harley

I wrote the image into a couple of scenes.

1928

A picture arrives from Herb’s sister Ilona, now back in New Zealand: one of her own oils on a piece of hardboard, ‘to warm the house, or perhaps your bedroom’.

            ‘Good lord,’ says Herb as they open the parcel on a cleared space of kitchen table.

            A naked woman reclines on a green-striped sofa. Uniformly tanned, like Ilona herself last summer. No pale thighs or upper arms for her when they all went into the Kyeburn River one sweltering day. A red shoe lies discarded on the floor.

            ‘That’s awkward.’ Herb might be referring to the oddly triangular shape of the sofa, to the woman hiding her eyes from the open curtain, to the raised foot seeming to kick a pink cloth (a tiny garment?) off the end. Or to the question of where to hang it. If at all. He flips it around and reads, ‘The Lorelei’. Turns it back. ‘She hasn’t signed it. What the heck. Just for a laugh, is it?’

            They take in the unpunctuated breasts and fingerless hands.

            ‘It’s not finished,’ Nell says. ‘But it is rather fun.’

            Rather fun, except that it makes her and Herb lose their bearings; fun in an awkward way, which means it will be relegated to a dark corner in the least-used room of the house, and hung more prominently (‘I won’t have her saying we’re prudes.’), temporarily, next time Ilona comes to visit.

May 8, 2024
Concerning Nell: hacking it

‘When chopping walnuts put them in a sponge tin and chop with a mustard tin. Four edges to chop with, & the tin to keep the walnuts from spilling.’ Genius.

In an earlier blog I showcased the little green notebook with the meticulously copied handy hints. I found, on exploring the cardboard box entitled ‘Old Recipes’, that there is also a red notebook, a teal one, two blues and three black notebooks — enough for each grandadult to have one — full of tip after tip, in no particular order and with no way to access, say, Picnics: ‘When carrying a bottle of milk in a basket, to keep it upright use a bicycle clip fastened through the wicker.’ ‘To keep a pile of sandwiches fresh for some time, put slices of plain bread on top and bottom.’

Mice dislike the smell of mint…

Or kitchen hacks: ‘Jam substitute. Grate the rind of one lemon & one orange into half a cup of honey. Very nice.’ ‘To give an almond flavour to milk puddings, boil a peach leaf in the milk.’ Who knew!

Raising Kids: ‘When a child is left-handed, to teach her to knit, etc, sit her down opposite you and she will be able to follow your movements.’ (Which doesn’t answer the question of how to teach a right-handed kid or a boy. Nell had a child who needed to learn left-handedness because of malformation in the right. I’m pretty sure the hints came before the child.) ‘When giving a drink to sick children, make a small hole in the top of a screwtop jar & insert a drinking straw. This avoids spills on the bedclothes.’

Pure labour: you’re only going to do this when lovesick or desperate to impress. You’ll need to plan ahead: ‘Rose petal sandwiches. Gather petals as soon as dew is off them – before the heat of the day. Place some in an earthenware dish. Cover with wax paper, then a layer of fresh butter’, (chopped? melted? sliced or smeared?) ‘& another layer of rose petals. Weigh down’ (with a book? a rock? a pound or two of butter?) & leave in a cool place for 24 hours. The butter is now perfumed. Put this on brown bread & butter’ (more butter?) with a few fresh rose petals & press another slice of brown bread on top.’

This recipe is patently not one for hungry farm workers or the kids just home after walking/riding five miles from school. This is food for the subtly attuned or the lovelorn.

Hang onto those petals!

April 23, 2024
Concerning Nell: covering the cover

Making a book cover is always a bit of a mission. Where do you start? What kind of image do you choose, and how abstract should it be? If you have a committee (publisher Cloud Ink Press, author, designer, booksellers, friends), possibilities can multiply just when you need to narrow down the focus.I had blue in mind from the start, powdery blue with a tinge of grey. Thinking of a passage in the novel that follows a description of Nell’s hard-won flower garden — ‘She needs her … garden plots to speak for her, to speak back to the hills and sky, whose eloquence she has responded to more deeply with each passing year. The garden, she thinks shyly, is her song of praise.’ — I saw the hills of the Maniototo punctuated by flowers.

My rough sketches failed to convince. But designer Caroline Pope did her darnedest. We considered Maniototo-inspired hills by artist Claire Beynon.

We considered the Elizabeth Strout look:

Then, in a drawer in the old family house, I found photos we’d not seen before. Striking images of Nell in her school uniform. The look on her face sums up so much of what the novel wants to convey about her.

We opted for Nell instead of flowers. I conscripted daughter Alex to draw from the photo; the drawing could be superimposed on hills. Alex has a remarkable ability to sketch faces capturing the essence or spark of that person. She recently created a cardboard cover to wrap around the tape of the Ōtepoti Music Compilation she’d organised (a massive job, done brilliantly). I reckon my Dunedin readers will recognise a few of these Ōtepoti musicians.

And voilà, Alex clinched Nell too.

However, the team opted to stick with the photo. We asked designer Caroline Pope to play with that. We considered going psychedelic:

Design, Caroline Pope

I feel that in our final, more conservative choice — Nell against a photo of Mt Kyeburn under summer snow — we might have clipped Caroline’s wings a little, but if there’s a reprint we’ll have another chance to showcase her design verve and colour flare.

Meanwhile, we have a cover I love, that all of us agreed upon. The drawing will be treasured and used again elsewhere…

Pre-order here!

April 12, 2024
Concerning Nell: ‘Change and decay in all around I see’

The roses are drooping in the vase. EBB’s poem bears a whiff of the past.

Dust has settled in tufts on the books crammed into the shelves of the old family house.

This is the house where Nell lived, her last home, which she disliked. Their move into town meant down-sizing and paying more for less—going from two acres to one, from a sprawling, turreted old house to an old villa of standard size. The town house stands on a kind of ridge exposed to the sou’wester’s bite. The bedrooms are on the cold side of the house. The toilet is dark and narrow, the shower in the frigid wash-house only three steps from the front door. Nell made the best of it by growing begonias in the glasshouse. By adding a porch to catch every drop of afternoon sun. By decorating the smallest, warmable room for her own use. By furnishing the drawing room with elegant cream curtains and sofa covers, displaying a few good ceramic pieces along with her favoured paintings. There, her little desk sat beside the north-facing window, looking out onto the tops of shrubs that have since grown into towering trees—which block all sun.

We’re looking through the bookshelves. Weighing, sniffing, sneezing. Marvelling.

Would one of my readers enjoy this tiny tome?

March 28, 2024
Concerning Nell: Stains of the past

I’ve had a rummage through the recipe book drawer at the old family villa. I guess this book was my grandmother Nell’s, and Cakes was the best garnished section. I can imagine the buttery finger pressed to the open page, the quick check: ‘one flat teaspoon of soda, same of cream of tartar’, as she flew around the kitchen. If the oven was hot and ready, she wouldn’t have stopped at Ginger Biscuits (Good), but also made a Fruit Cake and some kind of slice, perhaps the Khaki Cake marked with an X.

The ads in these old recipe books read as a kind of muted horror story. I wonder how much ‘Aluminiumware’ the family was persuaded to buy, and if they did use it in the kitchen, how much did they ingest over the years? Likewise the Asbestos board, lauded in another cookbook as versatile for use indoors or out, painted or bare. And then there was potential loss to be reckoned with as you flipped the pages: not of cell phone or high-tech hearing aids, but of limbs and organs. At least each one was given a value.

The cookbook has lost its cover, but I imagine it was put together by some outfit such as the Mother’s Union (which in 1926 became the League of Mothers and Homemakers of New Zealand), and no contribution was overlooked. Take Jugged Hare, below, times three. Mrs Grigg insists that the hare, once skinned, should not be washed. Mrs Adams allows that it be wiped to remove blood, and be cut into pieces each ‘about the size of an egg’. Mrs Nicholls skips the fine detail. Each recipe adds in a second kind of meat: gravy beef; veal forcemeat; bacon. Two recipes include the addition of port wine, two include lemon (rind and juice) and two suggest serving with red currant jelly. I suppose you could also give rabbit the Jugging treatment, but why would you, when it could be Shaped, French, Casseroled, Hot-Potted, Pied, or Stewed in Milk?

Familiarity with the rudiments of baking was assumed. J.D.’s Jam Pudding: The weight of two eggs in butter, sugar and flour, two tablespoons of jam, one teaspoon soda. Mix and boil for two hours. (Good luck!)

March 18, 2024
Concerning Nell: Handy hints

I found the little green notebook in the aunts’ kitchen the other day. All written in their mother Nell’s hand with an ink pen (it was that or a pencil back in the 1920s, I guess).

When cutting out georgette on table dip your scissors in hot water before (and during) cutting.

Stew prunes in tea – the flavour will be improved.

I suspect that Nell wrote the little book of handy hints before she got immersed in the hurly-burly of life with children and the farm, when she was green enough to imagine there was a solution to every problem, large or small.

To prevent the fat from soaking into fish when frying, add a tablespoon of vinegar to the pot when it comes to the boil.

To prevent stocks from going back to singles, & be sure of getting double blooms, discard the seeds from both ends of the pods, & sow only the middle ones.

Nell loved the hills hemming the Maniototo and was pained to leave them as abruptly as they did in 1947, when wool prices had plummeted and our grandfather, less experienced in the farming cycles of paucity and plenty, sold the farm without consulting her.

Prevent slipping on icy roads by rubbing a raw potato on the soles and heels of leather shoes.

To make tinned peas taste like fresh ones, wash and drain peas, put a knob of butter in saucepan, add peas, a little salt and sugar & a large sprig of mint, Heat slowly, shaking saucepan round. Add 2 tablespoons of hot water, & the peas are ready for the table.

Our extended family has just returned from Naseby where in the 1960s Aunt F bought half an acre on the northern edge of town – a few miles from what had been the family farm – with a small caravan to park on it. A long-drop hole was dug, a dunny popped over it. Holiday park! There was plenty of room for tents, and a view over the infant hawthorn hedge of Mt Kyeburn and the Ida Range.

A few years later, she bought the old Kyeburn school house and had it trucked up the gravel back roads to the paddock.

Back from Naseby and full family immersion, it’s time for me to approve final tweaks of the manuscript before typesetting, to pep up ‘the socials’ and play with the blog. Thanks, re that, to my brother Hugh who does the background tinkering.

Soak a lamp wick in vinegar & dry before putting in the lamp.

Little girls’ socks sometimes bunch under the feet. To prevent this, draw a cake of damp soap around the child’s ankle, & the socks will stay in place all day.

February 25, 2024
Concerning Nell: Strand by strand

Cold sou’west rain in late January. Nothing like it to keep a person indoors and contemplating the sedentary work awaiting her. In this case the blog that groans and creaks from under-use.

It always helps to start with an image. (Goes hunting through recent pics…)

Pertinaciousness

These rough strands? Chimney plugs. Earlier in the summer, when indoor fires were still occasionally required in Dunedin, we lit ours. Gusts and tufts of smoke forced their way out through the door seal into the living room. R climbed onto the roof and fished around in the chimney, pulled out ti tree leaves and metres of grass. Relit the fire: smoke went up; smoke came down. Starlings were seen, and heard, scratching about up there. We made more smoke. They did more bird business. Another roof expedition: more vegetation removed. More smoke — inside the house. R capped the chimney with wire netting and called the expert. What you see above is what they retrieved from deep in the flu. Think of the labour. Strand by strand, the starlings gathered and flew and wriggled into the small chimney space and wove and wound, and repeated, trip after trip — in spite of human interference and smoke storms, banging and bad-mouthing. Puts me to shame. About the only area where I’ve manage to practise such pertinacity is in the writing of novels. Scene by scene, line by line. Who knows why. Bird-brained, perhaps.

When we go to Naseby, we walk most evenings up onto Ridge Road. You can see why. The light is in constant flux. The hill at the centre is Mt Kyeburn, the highest point on the sheep station where my grandparents farmed from 1927 to 1947. Danseys Pass Road winds up the valley to its east. It must have been a formidable place to raise five children. These days, we shut up the Naseby family house in winter, knowing that any un-emptied pipes would freeze and that the little woodburner would be inadequate to the task of warming the living-room, let alone further afield. Nell and Herb (as I’ve called him in the novel) built a concrete house at Glenshee — quite a novelty in the 1920s and quite a horror to contemplate from the comfort of the 2020s, since there was no insulation. Dad was given the open-air sun porch to sleep in, year-round. Still, he got a strong constitution.

That’s Nell in white in about 1910 when she would have been 13 and enjoying one of her few high school years. She was called home to help out on the farm. I don’t know what sort of car this is, but as early as 1915, Nell drove a Singer. In the novel the car becomes her passport to freedom, or the version of freedom available to a young woman born a hundred and twenty years ago.

January 23, 2024
Ratification

It’s in the contract. I re-activate my website and plump up my social media presence. Nell, the novel of my grandmother, will be published early next year with Cloud Ink Press, I’m delighted to report.

Meanwhile, Ratty has been on the shelf, perusing the Rosa Mira backlist and itching for re-employment. There’s silver on his muzzle now but, unlike me, he’s not at all averse to scampering about on FB and Insta, doing the business.

The website is creaking back into shape. There are a few things yet to remember and figure out, however, we have allies, and here’s a start.

September 5, 2023
Corona Karuna

Resolved to complete what’s begun, I visit the community garden, bring home fruit, hull and eat raspberries (not before drawing them), colour, scan and send the pic to friends. Small satisfactions.

Lockdown day 21. Two weeks ago the grocery shop felt eerie: the spaced-out queue snaking around the carpark; the sanitiser; the distancing; the grim care we were all taking; being barked at for stepping over a blue line; germ phobia between groceries and car then adding bleach between car and aunt, aunt and car (who has the germs? I forget); the sanitiser (blow the nose, sanitise again)… I had a tiny weep for us all.

Then, today, I was at Vege Boys before it opened. Whisked around, then laughed with the owner about sudden cravings for takeaways: fish and chips (me, although we hardly ever eat them) and butter chicken (her). Whisked on through the supermarket in record time and, except for two tiny post-Easter bunnies, stuck to the list. Even though I was buying for two households, it was fast, as they intended: no queue, no pause, no bagging of items, no small-talk, and anyway the new plexiglass screen and face mask between me and the checkout operator’s words made them indecipherable.

The aunt was in good cheer, still a little baffled by my insistence on bringing her groceries each week. (‘But I can just pop over the hill in the car.’ ‘No, over-70s are advised…’ ‘Oh yes … vulnerable.’ I left her to unpack the fruit, veg, soup and packages, all mildly tinged with janola.

Lunch was a Skype call with C and R. They were eating leftovers from plastic snap bowls. We slurped pumpkin soup prepared with the aunt in mind. We learned from the doctor that although covid-phobia is high, bike accident cases are way down, along with the incidence of common-garden flu. I suggest we lock down every April in order to cleanse Aotearoa of incipient winter ailments.

Much has been written about the possible awful outcomes of this pandemic, mainly to do with the over-exertion of power by governments and the under-performance of ‘the economy’. At least as much has crossed my screen about the possible magnificent outcomes of this great, sorrow-tinged semi-colon in time (it’s not a full stop, nor is it a colon, which I think of as an equals sign [pandemic: med panic]; we don’t want after to be the same as before), mostly to do with our rediscovered, revivified fellow-feeling, Earth-feeling, creature-feeling, community-feeling, feeling-feeling and the slow, spacious kindliness we begin to sense underlies it all.

a. awaiting deployment on keyboard since who knows what viral remnants hide in its suddenly nasty crevices
b. in recommended dilution for application everywhere
c. we never had more than 30 ml of sanitiser—making it last another week
d. things we get around to while confined to barracks—making the bath fairy
e. true, there’s no e
f. new attire for when visiting aunt
g. polystyrene shed from pouf
h. shred shed from R’s yoga mat
i. mirror shed from Indian cushion

April 16, 2020
Years pass

Turning 61. Life is still its old paradoxical self. (Why does the notion persist, that one day it will fall into order?) Taking it all in is the thing. Muskets and flowers. Trucks and colouring pencils. The presence and the absence of loved ones.

Have been reading Anne Salmond’s Two Worlds, coincidentally as Aotearoa reckons with the fact of 250 years since Cook et al turned up and bungled the first exchanges: nine Māori dead by the time they sailed on. An inauspicious start. Amends are made slowly; there will never be any laurels to rest on. There will only be doing better. And better again.

Spring flowers under gloomy skies. We hoist a swing in anticipation of the grandsons’ visit, and their parents … they’re in the country, but not here yet. Pangs. I swot up the road code for a class two heavy vehicle license. Passing the theory has proved the easy part.

Maiden, the film, is galvanising (98% on Rotten Tomatoes). Patently women have scarcely begun to unearth and exhibit their capacities in the world … in the case of the boat race, for determination, strategy, endurance, comradeship under pressure, courage. For a power-boost, women young and old, go and see it.

I was given a flowering Pulsatilla Vulgaris whose homeopathic signature is moping and weeping. A sweet reminder that it’s okay to do so — it’s only human — but ten minutes might be enough, okay?

Then it’s time to go back on deck, even if the deck’s slippery now and then, with ice or spume or tears.

October 13, 2019
Still waiting

An oldie, for no particular reason.

Talking with a friend recently whose time is freer than it was. She notices a tendency to fret on her now-unscheduled days. That’s why people go to work full-time, I said. No time for fretting. I was going to be ‘at work’ this week, but without snow, my role as hut manager was postponed along with the ski-field opening. An ‘empty’ week. I’ve completed the novel I’d been writing and fiddling with for the last 8 years. Finished my editing jobs and tidied up various loose ends. In this unscheduled week, I can do what I like (get onto the tax return, start a new writing project?) but without the sense of urgency and preoccupation that ‘work’ brings. There’s time to fret.

This morning I’ve read about the million-plus Rohingya people anticipating months of monsoon rain on their villages of plastic sheeting, bamboo and mud. There are around 66 million refugees perched or wandering precariously in our world. I read about the misogyny, racism and slavery mindset inherent in the sex-trade worldwide, which is millions of children and women living in poverty traps every bit as ineluctable as monsoons and mud. And I watch videos of a southern right whale frolicking (if that word can be applied to so many tons of limbless mammal, but it really does seem to be playing) in Wellington Harbour, enjoying the spectacle, but the question lurks: how much plastic is it likely to be imbibing from our coastal waters, along with plankton and krill? Our oceans are rapidly becoming Plastic Soup.

Fretting! Futilely … unless I find ways to contribute to the improvement of these huge problems. A small donation. A letter in defence of. A wish or a prayer. A trip to Bin Inn to buy groceries not packaged in plastic. Is this the best I can do?

Also these days, world attention has been riveted on the 12 boys and their coach holed up in the flooded cave in Thailand. We felt prickly with anxiety over their plight and the agonised decision-making of those capable of getting them out. The navy seals became heros, gods with the power of life and death. Why were we so mesmerised by this story? Because we’re all cave-phobic to one degree or another. Because children were involved. Because it had all the elements of a thriller movie, but with more at stake. Because it resonated with our human plight: we have worked our way into a tight corner. The flood waters are rising. We might find ways, like the meditating boys, to keep ourselves steady in the short term, in our local setting, but we imagine we’ll have to rely on people with more expertise and prominence than we to get us out of the worldwide fix. Is that how it is?

Waiting again this afternoon for a report from the mountain. Perhaps a winter escape.

July 13, 2018
Going to the mountain

Three and a half years since I wrote here, in the hot Northland summer of 2015. Now I’m stockpiling stuff for the cold. For a winter playing lodge manager (‘hut mum’ if the age or behaviour of the ski-schoolers calls for it it) in the Southern Alps. I’ll go fortified by kindness and comfort from friends and acquaintances: slippers crocheted by dear hands; cosy ski pants and thermals given by a member of our local ‘Buy Nothing’ group; boots lent by a friend in whose footsteps I’m proud to walk; skis, boots, goggles (albeit outmoded) from my father-in-law who possibly hasn’t quite given up skiing at 95.

I don’t love the cold, but I’ll be well prepared for it, and it will be in keeping with the quality of the air at 1400 metres and the wrap-around snow-peak panorama. It takes an hour or more to walk from the car park to the hut where I’ll be living with 7 other staff members half my age. From the bullet points on the website, the skifield:

* is not for the masses, you won’t find the white Spyder pants type here.

* comprises big and raw alpine terrain, very different from other NZ ski fields. You can see glaciers from the lodge windows.

It’s ‘rad’ and friendly and besides my other duties, I’m the bar-person. Yikes. I’ll keep you posted.

I listened this morning as two women discussed the concepts of Hannah Arendt, who wrote, among other books, The Human Condition, and The Origins of Totalitarianism, and who coined ‘the banality of evil’. All of which are pressingly relevant in our century. I was freshly struck by the assessment that a person who flees their own country, and is thereby made stateless, loses also their human rights. Which is a hard condition to fathom. Basically, they’re no longer entitled to any of the things that make your life and mine worth living. To quote Arendt concerning the plight of the 20th century refugee stripped of their statehood: ‘The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human’. It seems we struggle to understand that unless we (the world) realise and honour the something sacred in every human (of whatever persuasion, origin or circumstance), our current experiment called human life on Earth will end in failure, soonish.

Conversely, when every person on the planet is granted the same rights as every other human, nothing will be impossible — except war, starvation and the exclusion of our human kin from the essentials (and the joys and comforts) of life.

Mundanely speaking, it seems worth considering how I unintentionally subtract from the humanity of those I’m in contact with: taking someone for granted; treating another in utilitarian fashion; failing to look and see, listen and hear; failing to think and imagine on behalf of another.

And it helps to realise that by remedying the failures listed above, I can add an iota to the sum of our humanity.

June 25, 2018
Dipping in

Woke this morning in another new house, with a full view of the Pacific and a fat Abyssinian who seems indifferent to our presence unless we’re stroking his ginger sleekness.

Over the road, we swim in waves which, in the south, would knock you flat. Up here they churn over you aerated and playful; it’s like being in a benign washing machine.

After four days in the bush, I’m out of touch with the world out there more in synch with the world in here. I feel more useful and productive than when I’m hearing the news and it’s making me agitated. How to do both: know the worst yet stay calm and productive?

Meanwhile I dip in and out; advance and retreat; listen and stop listening; inspire, expire.

February 2, 2015
The state of play

Two years on, still house-sitting, still loving it. ‘Dolphins!’ comes the call from the beach. This month we’re perched between two bodies of water; such dynamism is alluring. In a roar of wind the estuary turns to ink. So, too, is the idea of home: vegetables we shepherd from seed to plate; trees we watch grow; rooms with our loved objects, clothing in drawers, real desks … sun again: a stripe of milky jade sweeps the bay … friends who know where to find us.

We’re perfectly okay ‘in the moment’, as long as we rest there. It’s the mind that races about and causes panic: what if we miss out on this or that house? what if the market gets away on us? can we live in a hut in the north? do we really belong in the south? will our friends forget us? why can’t we decide? A gannet glides past the window, gleaming wings spanner-tight. Still, we talk to the bank. The real estate agents. We’re keeping a finger to the wind. The pohutukawa shakes its head as shadows race ashore and gulls lift and cry.

October 30, 2014
Coining the world

Fork.

Sharp.

Corn.

A-ice.

Cold. Cold. Cold.

Baby.

Rock, rock.

Up

says Spencer.

May 9, 2014
The 32nd 30th

There’s a fine line (there are many fine lines, including those in my favourite shirt) between objectively and wisely questioning what you think and do, and starting to wonder if it’s all wrong: what if I’ve taken the wrong turn here; made a poor choice there; spent my time badly; responded inadequately; pegged my life to a flawed set of premises — especially when every problem out there looks so big and insoluble while what’s in front of me is comparatively tiny and manageable. We’re strange creatures. If it ain’t broke, some of us look for cracks anyway.

It’s time to feed the dog. Pack up the house. Post this. Go and eat dinner with the man I’ve eaten dinner with most nights for 32 years.

Gratefully.

April 30, 2014
Following the rise and fall

It takes a while (55 years or more) to learn and trust that life is rhythmic, to learn not to be thrown by the big shuddering in-breath or the (occasionally dis)gusting out-breath. Not to be dismayed by the sometimes-too-long pause between these two when it’s tempting to think something has died and gone forever.

Following panic, calm. Following antipathy, a warming smile. Following (self-recrimination, acceptance. After the burning question, (possibly not an answer but) acceptance. After visitors, fruitful hours or days alone (if you’re old enough and not too old to be allowed those). After days or hours alone, welcome visitors. After bread and vegemite, an anniversary lunch.

(Following The Collapse, The Reintegration but how soon and in what form no-one knows.)

After the high, brimming tide, the emptied mudflats. And a dog waiting to run across them. Okay, we’re off.

April 28, 2014
Autumnal

For the first time in months, socks and shoes.

At the bird sanctuary we waited amidst nikau and puriri for tui, bellbirds, kereru, fantails, a robin, and when we’d given up, at last, tieke — the saddleback.

Girls in bikinis were swimming out from the beach and surging back through the cavern. In the cool afternoon, we weren’t even tempted to join them.

Kate appropriated a nikau bonnet.

The dog was so thrilled by our return she piddled on the kitchen floor.

April 24, 2014
How a day goes

Walked into the sunrise.

Read half a manuscript. Strong and unsettling.

Swam at the next bay with the girl who laughs in water.

Joined the Great Northern Library.

The neighbour handed fresh, smoked kawhai over the fence. Kedgeree coming up.

April 23, 2014
If in doubt, go in

Salt water is good for many things.

A flat mood, for example.

Full immersion is best. Add blue waves, a swimming dog, and a girl who can’t stop laughing for the joy of it.

Fifteen minutes restores full buoyancy.

A cup of tea on the beach is icing on the buoyant.

April 22, 2014