Whales

I’m getting to the end of Sarah’s alphabet. When I started thinking about the letter W, the idea of whales kept surfacing. I knew that New Zealand’s whaling industry was vigorous in the 1840s, but with no whaling stations in Wellington harbour, would Sarah have known anything of it? The nearest whaling stations were on the Kapiti coast, and across Cook Strait at Te Awaiti and Port Underwood. The Cook Strait whalers came to Wellington frequently – the ships, and the men would have been common sites around town. But would Sarah have ever seen a whale, except perhaps in the distance while on the voyage to New Zealand? I started digging around, and got quite a surprise. While the people who live and work around Wellington today know that dolphins and pods of orca frequently come into the harbour – that’s a real traffic and work-stopper when it happens – I didn’t know that the southern right whale had been a frequent visitor in the 1840s, choosing the harbour as a breeding ground. I was enchanted to discover that they had made so much noise that people even complained about them.

W is for whale. If she was going to lie waiting for sleep like this every night until the baby came, she would be soon be exhausted. The baby was wide awake and cavorting around inside her like the playing dolphins they often saw in the harbour. The idea made her smile. If this baby was a dolphin, then she must be a whale, the great size of her. There were whales in Lambton Harbour at the moment – they often came right in during the winter, to the consternation of the ferry-men. She and Ovid had watched them from the hill yesterday, waiting for the sudden explosions of air and water as each giant creature surfaced, then slid slowly back under the grey water, broad tail rising in a farewell wave. She could hear them now through the thin walls of the house, blowing and whooshing, seeming as close as the garden in the still night air. Some people complained that the whales kept them awake at night, but she was uncomfortably awake anyway, and they kept her company, all whales together, wallowing through the dark night.

The following “memory” Sarah has of learning to sew is actually mine. It might have been a small table-cloth, I think, but I remember the large red-and-white checks, and the challenge of positioning the needle so it would go through the corners exactly, drawing the white embroidery cotton in a neat line behind it. To envisage Sarah’s tiny, neat stitches, I only have to turn my head to see my mother’s needlework, artistry that is exquisitely detailed and perfect. Sarah would have been proud to see her great-grand-daughter’s skill and talent.

X is for cross-stitch, the tiny little stitches she was working across the hem of her new table-cloth. The first stitch her mother had taught her, sewing on fabric with large red and white checks to help her get the stitches even, going from corner to corner one way along the row, and back again on the opposite corners. Now she made the tiniest stitches, evenly spaced, without even thinking about it. In a few years, she would be looking for checked fabric to teach a daughter the same way her mother had taught her. Would it be this baby, or would she have to wait a little longer for a girl?

The model for this “snapshot” of Catullus is my own Avro, a savage and enthusiastic hunter who can be quite charming and affectionate when the mood takes him. I don’t know what the Norgrove family cats were named – later generations had prosaic names, like my grandmother’s Ginger and Nugget – no prizes for guessing the colours of those two! But when it came to the Norgrove’s first cat in New Zealand, I was stumped – until it dawned on me, looking at the children’s names, that Sarah and William had obviously made an agreement early on – he would choose the names for the boys, she would choose the names of the girls. This would explain the Latin poets (Ovid and Horace), the admired writer Walter (for Walter Scott), and just barely, the obscure Oscar, from the even more obscure Poems of Ossian – William chose to show off his education in the naming of his sons. Sarah, on the other hand, opted for the more traditional girls’ names of the time – Kate and Emma. Gertrude, of course, was for the good ship which brought them to New Zealand. So if William named the boys, and the first cat was male, then he would have chosen its name as well. Naturally, he would have chosen another poet from his Latin education – Catullus, of course.

Y is for yawn. What was it about cats that they could yawn so unabashedly and look so pleased with themselves? Catullus was yawning, a great gaping stretch of the mouth that displayed his pink gums and his sharp little white teeth, his pink tongue curling with pleasure. He ended his yawn with a little squeak, and shut his mouth, his eyes closed to little slits while he decided whether to sleep or take another look for the mouse that had been trying to get into the food-safe. He stretched and yawned again – it was catching. She felt it building up in the back of her throat, forcing her mouth open and her eyes closed, a great sucking in of air. When she looked up again, eyes watering, Catullus was watching with an air of satisfaction, as if he had made her yawn on purpose.

The last letter of the alphabet was obvious – at least to any New Zealander (and anyone whose name starts with Z).

Z is for New Zealand. Funny how Z was a letter that she hadn’t needed to use much before, hadn’t noticed in words before, and now it seemed to be the most important letter in the alphabet. Reading the news from home reprinted in the Spectator, she found herself constantly seeking out the Z’s, thinking every Z would mean New Zealand, and being surprised and oddly disappointed to encounter it in Zoological Society and Zambia.