We were talking at lunch yesterday about the Depression, and things women did back then, like turning sheets side to middle, and making soap. Actually, with rising mortgage rates and petrol prices, and the drive for less waste and more sustainable lifestyles, there has been quite a bit in the media lately about the simpler life and rediscovering the thrifty tricks of our fore-mothers. Not to mention the health gurus recommending eating the way our [great] grandparents did (if not the way our cave ancestors did) – food in its closest-to-natural state, rather than processed and packaged beyond recognition. I heard a doctor the other night who said to imagine you were taking your grandmother or great grandmother to the supermarket – anything that she wouldn’t recognise as food shouldn’t go in the shopping trolley.
Which would be great, if only grandma was living at my place, so that when I staggered home from a day spent fighting corporate fires, there would be a great steaming plate of fresh cooked veggies from the garden waiting for my dinner. My grandmother wouldn’t recognise 50% of things in my kitchen cupboards and fridge. Great-great grandmother Sarah wouldn’t recognise 95% of the food in my kitchen, and she probably wouldn’t recognise my kitchen either, being as she didn’t have a fridge, electric oven, even hot and cold piped water, let alone a microwave.
Anyway, Dad said he was really surprised one day, arriving at my Mum’s parents’ place, to find my Nan making soap in the copper. This would have been the late 1950s or early 1960s, so there can’t have been many women still making their own soap. Mum says it was the soap they used for washing the dishes (well, thank goodness for dolphin-friendly detergent, I say). When Granny Norgrove (that would be Edith, wife of Oscar, Sarah’s second son) was still alive and living with Mum’s family, it was her particular job to make the soap. So, there’s soap-making for domestic use still in living memory in my family, and I can see the line of my soap-making fore-mothers stretching back into the distant past.
Sarah would absolutely have made her own soap. She would have saved all the fat and tallow that came into the house for this – right down to the last bacon rind, probably – until she had enough to make a big boil-up worthwhile. Storing fat without refrigeration – stinky. There were ways of granulating the fat for long-term storage without the pong, which involved boiling and straining, and reheating in water until the granular stage was achieved. Great choice – extra hours of back-breaking work, or putting up with rancid fat?
When it was time for soap-making, out came the copper or the kettle, and the lye and the fat, for a great boil-up. [Nasty stuff, lye. Soap-making time would have been one of those occasions when you’d want to be quite sure that your adventurous toddler was firmly tied to a solid piece of furniture far, far away from the soap-making operation.] The fire was lit and stoked up and fed well to keep it hot. Once the fat and lye were melted and creamy, salt was added to harden it, and then it was stirred like mad until the soap started forming and leaving a ring around the stirring stick. Then the fire was put out and the soap left to harden, or poured out into moulds. When hard, it was cut up with wire and stored for use – for washing dishes, or grating into the copper to wash the clothes, and even as bath soap. Unless you had something sweet-scented to add to the brew, you wouldn’t have come out of the bath smelling all that sweet and clean...
So soap-making was hot, hard physical work involving dangerous chemicals and reeking rancid fat. We might yearn for a return to simpler times, but I’d rather sleep on the hard seam of sheets turned side-to-middle than have to make soap. I’ll be more grateful in future for the dolphin-friendly squeezy-bottle detergent, the low-suds sensitive-skin washing powder, and the vanilla-scented body-wash……………
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Autumn
I was admiring the autumn leaves as I drove through Greytown on Saturday. Autumn seems to have been a long time coming – a drawn-out summer (not complaining) punctuated by some nasty storms, like a series of false starts. It seemed the trees didn’t quite know what to do for a while there, but now the autumn colours are in full swing. In a week or so, I’ll be driving through Greytown with the windscreen wipers going, to bat away the blizzards of tumbling leaves.
I wondered what Sarah and William thought of their first autumn in New Zealand, in 1842. New Zealand doesn’t have many deciduous native trees, and any English trees planted by settlers would be little more than saplings, so they wouldn’t have seen much autumn colour. And unless there’s a wild southerly, Wellington in autumn is pretty mild. Frosts are rare right down in the city, even in mid-winter. Only once have I seen a frost so hard and cold that even the railway sleepers around the side of the harbour between Petone and Wellington were white and glittering with ice crystals. Once or twice in a winter, I’ll see Parliament’s lawns frozen over – it’s such an unexpected sight that we public servants are startled out of our morning trudge to stop and stare.
So what was happening this week in 1842? The big news is that the Norgrove family was expecting an addition. Sarah was somewhere between 3 and 4 months pregnant – far enough along to be reasonably sure about it, but perhaps not far enough to be hinting in letters home about the anticipated “increase”. [The baby, to be born on November 1st, was my great-grandfather Oscar.] Sarah’s mind would have already been turning to how she was going to manage this confinement, so far from the support of her mother and sisters.
The family was still living on Thorndon flat, in the mud whare William rented for them on their second day in New Zealand. It had a clay floor, a leaky roof, and no glass in the windows – just calico covers. They were sharing with a former shipmate, who was in fact probably a lodger, and Sarah would have been feeding him and doing his washing as well as tending to William and Ovid. The expected baby must have put the pressure on, because before the end of winter the family moved to a better house on Lambton Quay.
In early May the weather was still relatively mild. The days were mainly breezy but fine, with day-time temperatures in the mid-teens, sometimes getting as high as 18 or 22. Labour was in short supply and high demand, and wages were good. “Mechanics” were commanding £2 a week, and general labourers £1/10. As William wasn’t yet advertising his painting business, it seems likely he was working for someone else and enjoying the benefit of the high wages.
Food prices were generally reasonable, although bread at 10s for a loaf was a little pricey – more likely reflecting a shortage of bakers than the price of flour, which was 3d to 4d per pound. Sarah could get fresh beef at 10d a pound, mutton at 9d a pound and pork at 4d a pound. Eggs were 3 shillings for a dozen, so a couple of laying hens at 4 shillings each would have been worth saving for.
The Mechanics’ Institute had had its first meeting. William was to become a stalwart member, and for a period, also taught the drawing class. There was plenty of land for sale in Wellington, and the Manawatu was beginning to open up as well. A selection of houses available for rent began to appear in newspaper advertisements, along with job vacancies. The only dark cloud on the horizon was the forthcoming investigation of land claims by William Spain, the Commissioner for Land. As virtually all of the New Zealand Company’s Wellington land purchases were to be investigated, it would have been an uncomfortable time for landowners and local Maori.
After six months in New Zealand, the Norgroves would have been starting to feel quite settled. The strangeness of the place would have started to wear off as they got into the routines of their new life. Their rather rickety accommodation probably hadn’t caused many problems in what would have seemed to them to be quite balmy weather. And their first little New Zealander was on his way……………..
I wondered what Sarah and William thought of their first autumn in New Zealand, in 1842. New Zealand doesn’t have many deciduous native trees, and any English trees planted by settlers would be little more than saplings, so they wouldn’t have seen much autumn colour. And unless there’s a wild southerly, Wellington in autumn is pretty mild. Frosts are rare right down in the city, even in mid-winter. Only once have I seen a frost so hard and cold that even the railway sleepers around the side of the harbour between Petone and Wellington were white and glittering with ice crystals. Once or twice in a winter, I’ll see Parliament’s lawns frozen over – it’s such an unexpected sight that we public servants are startled out of our morning trudge to stop and stare.
So what was happening this week in 1842? The big news is that the Norgrove family was expecting an addition. Sarah was somewhere between 3 and 4 months pregnant – far enough along to be reasonably sure about it, but perhaps not far enough to be hinting in letters home about the anticipated “increase”. [The baby, to be born on November 1st, was my great-grandfather Oscar.] Sarah’s mind would have already been turning to how she was going to manage this confinement, so far from the support of her mother and sisters.
The family was still living on Thorndon flat, in the mud whare William rented for them on their second day in New Zealand. It had a clay floor, a leaky roof, and no glass in the windows – just calico covers. They were sharing with a former shipmate, who was in fact probably a lodger, and Sarah would have been feeding him and doing his washing as well as tending to William and Ovid. The expected baby must have put the pressure on, because before the end of winter the family moved to a better house on Lambton Quay.
In early May the weather was still relatively mild. The days were mainly breezy but fine, with day-time temperatures in the mid-teens, sometimes getting as high as 18 or 22. Labour was in short supply and high demand, and wages were good. “Mechanics” were commanding £2 a week, and general labourers £1/10. As William wasn’t yet advertising his painting business, it seems likely he was working for someone else and enjoying the benefit of the high wages.
Food prices were generally reasonable, although bread at 10s for a loaf was a little pricey – more likely reflecting a shortage of bakers than the price of flour, which was 3d to 4d per pound. Sarah could get fresh beef at 10d a pound, mutton at 9d a pound and pork at 4d a pound. Eggs were 3 shillings for a dozen, so a couple of laying hens at 4 shillings each would have been worth saving for.
The Mechanics’ Institute had had its first meeting. William was to become a stalwart member, and for a period, also taught the drawing class. There was plenty of land for sale in Wellington, and the Manawatu was beginning to open up as well. A selection of houses available for rent began to appear in newspaper advertisements, along with job vacancies. The only dark cloud on the horizon was the forthcoming investigation of land claims by William Spain, the Commissioner for Land. As virtually all of the New Zealand Company’s Wellington land purchases were to be investigated, it would have been an uncomfortable time for landowners and local Maori.
After six months in New Zealand, the Norgroves would have been starting to feel quite settled. The strangeness of the place would have started to wear off as they got into the routines of their new life. Their rather rickety accommodation probably hadn’t caused many problems in what would have seemed to them to be quite balmy weather. And their first little New Zealander was on his way……………..
Sunday, May 4, 2008
Baby wrangling
Last week my friend Helen asked an interesting question – how did Sarah carry Ovid? Okay, so initially it didn’t seem much of a question. At the time, we were sitting together on the train, and Helen had her 15-week-old Isabel slung across her lap, and I had teeny little Izzy-feet pummelling my thigh, and it seemed kind of obvious how any mother would carry a baby. But what she meant was, how did Sarah carry Ovid when she needed her hands free? Helen pointed out how women in most cultures had some kind of sling arrangement for carrying small babies. Maori women carried them in a kind of kete, or sometimes a sling made out of beaten lacebark. Izzy herself had arrived on board the train in a nifty stretchy sling, tied and knotted around Helen’s body so that the baby was pressed firmly face-first into her mum’s chest.
I have no kind of mental picture of women of Sarah’s time and class carrying or wearing babies in this way. You don’t see it in art; you don’t see it in photographs – although with the long exposure times of early photography, there aren’t many candid snaps – everything is carefully posed, adults and older children frozen straight-faced. Very young children are often blurs in these early photographs because they simply couldn’t keep still. It seemed to me that western women had moved away from baby-wearing before the nineteenth century, and didn’t rediscover it until the 1960s and 70s. Some quick internet research confirms this – baby-wearing seems to have remained normal practice for women from all over the world except western women.
Helen speculated that perhaps Sarah and other young settler mums might have taken up the baby-wearing idea from Maori women. Would they have done this, or would they have been more likely to follow the more western pattern of simply leaving babies lying in their cradles while doing household chores? I imagine that Sarah’s later babies might have spend time in a perambulator, popularised by Queen Victoria later in the century; but that Ovid and the older children would either have been carried in arms, or not carried at all. American pioneer experience shows that young children were left to their own devices far more often than in earlier or later times, simply because their parents were working too hard to spare much time for them. It seems likely that early New Zealand settlers were in much the same position, and this raises a more interesting question about how Sarah coped in the first few years.
Back in England, although William and Sarah lived in their own little house, both of their families were reasonably close at hand. In her early days of motherhood, Sarah would have had ample help and support from the extended families. It would have even been likely that one of her sisters or sisters-in-law might have lived with them for a time to help out, although on the night of the 1841 census, two weeks before they left for New Zealand, the household consisted only of William, Sarah and Ovid. Leaving the extended family behind was a huge step, but to some extent the loss of support would have been buffered by the five months spent on Gertrude with other young families. The women would have helped each other out with child-care and other domestic tasks; older children and other adults would have been around to watch the babies and toddlers. It wasn’t until they went ashore in Wellington that William, Sarah and Ovid were truly on their own – although perhaps not even then, as they shared their first house with a shipmate. [Sarah herself uses the word “shipmate”, which suggests a single man rather than a woman or family.]
Would the friendships and support systems developed on Gertrude have held up once the steerage passengers came ashore? Or would they have been so scattered, and so busy trying to survive, that they were isolated into their individual families? How did Sarah cope with an active toddler while doing everything she had to do to care for her family? I suppose Ovid wasn’t the first toddler to have ever been tied to the kitchen table by leading strings to prevent him falling in the fire while his mother cooked the dinner!
More children, paradoxically, might have made things slightly easier for Sarah. Older children (often even toddlers) were pressed into service to care for their siblings. Chances were that Ovid carried and held Oscar at least as much as either of their parents did, and that Gertrude was watched over and petted by both of them. Modern mums would probably have fifty fits if they saw their two year old lugging the newborn around the house, but the reality of large families in lower socio-economic households has meant that this has always happened, and probably still does.
The facts of how Sarah managed are lost in the past. In terms of my story, the bits that hold the known facts together, I now have Helen’s thoughts tucked into my sub-conscious to percolate. I can see, perhaps, that in desperation, Sarah might have fashioned a make-shift sling to cradle a fractious infant while leaving her hands free to peel the potatoes. I can see that William would have needed to whip up a rocking cradle for Oscar, that Sarah could have rocked with her foot while sewing or writing letters. I can’t see her wearing any of the babies in a sling while going out of the house. On the other hand, a carry-cot, Moses-basket style, would have been a distinct possibility… Anybody have any more ideas?
I have no kind of mental picture of women of Sarah’s time and class carrying or wearing babies in this way. You don’t see it in art; you don’t see it in photographs – although with the long exposure times of early photography, there aren’t many candid snaps – everything is carefully posed, adults and older children frozen straight-faced. Very young children are often blurs in these early photographs because they simply couldn’t keep still. It seemed to me that western women had moved away from baby-wearing before the nineteenth century, and didn’t rediscover it until the 1960s and 70s. Some quick internet research confirms this – baby-wearing seems to have remained normal practice for women from all over the world except western women.
Helen speculated that perhaps Sarah and other young settler mums might have taken up the baby-wearing idea from Maori women. Would they have done this, or would they have been more likely to follow the more western pattern of simply leaving babies lying in their cradles while doing household chores? I imagine that Sarah’s later babies might have spend time in a perambulator, popularised by Queen Victoria later in the century; but that Ovid and the older children would either have been carried in arms, or not carried at all. American pioneer experience shows that young children were left to their own devices far more often than in earlier or later times, simply because their parents were working too hard to spare much time for them. It seems likely that early New Zealand settlers were in much the same position, and this raises a more interesting question about how Sarah coped in the first few years.
Back in England, although William and Sarah lived in their own little house, both of their families were reasonably close at hand. In her early days of motherhood, Sarah would have had ample help and support from the extended families. It would have even been likely that one of her sisters or sisters-in-law might have lived with them for a time to help out, although on the night of the 1841 census, two weeks before they left for New Zealand, the household consisted only of William, Sarah and Ovid. Leaving the extended family behind was a huge step, but to some extent the loss of support would have been buffered by the five months spent on Gertrude with other young families. The women would have helped each other out with child-care and other domestic tasks; older children and other adults would have been around to watch the babies and toddlers. It wasn’t until they went ashore in Wellington that William, Sarah and Ovid were truly on their own – although perhaps not even then, as they shared their first house with a shipmate. [Sarah herself uses the word “shipmate”, which suggests a single man rather than a woman or family.]
Would the friendships and support systems developed on Gertrude have held up once the steerage passengers came ashore? Or would they have been so scattered, and so busy trying to survive, that they were isolated into their individual families? How did Sarah cope with an active toddler while doing everything she had to do to care for her family? I suppose Ovid wasn’t the first toddler to have ever been tied to the kitchen table by leading strings to prevent him falling in the fire while his mother cooked the dinner!
More children, paradoxically, might have made things slightly easier for Sarah. Older children (often even toddlers) were pressed into service to care for their siblings. Chances were that Ovid carried and held Oscar at least as much as either of their parents did, and that Gertrude was watched over and petted by both of them. Modern mums would probably have fifty fits if they saw their two year old lugging the newborn around the house, but the reality of large families in lower socio-economic households has meant that this has always happened, and probably still does.
The facts of how Sarah managed are lost in the past. In terms of my story, the bits that hold the known facts together, I now have Helen’s thoughts tucked into my sub-conscious to percolate. I can see, perhaps, that in desperation, Sarah might have fashioned a make-shift sling to cradle a fractious infant while leaving her hands free to peel the potatoes. I can see that William would have needed to whip up a rocking cradle for Oscar, that Sarah could have rocked with her foot while sewing or writing letters. I can’t see her wearing any of the babies in a sling while going out of the house. On the other hand, a carry-cot, Moses-basket style, would have been a distinct possibility… Anybody have any more ideas?
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