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……………..