Far, garden, Henry, Ilford, jam and kick

More of the alphabet exercise – thoughts from Sarah’s point of view.

F is for far. Far, far away, that’s how the old life seemed to her now, not just the thousands of miles and months of sailing far away, but far in the distant past, blurry and fragmented like memories of her childhood. Wellington was all about the here and now, young and brash and fresh, everyone broken out of the moulds of the past and bent on making something new.

I know there was some fairly keen gardening going on later in William and Sarah’s lives – the image of the Blenheim house that heads this page is evidence of that. But I’m not so sure about the early days. It’s unlikely that Sarah grew up in a house with a garden; William might have spent some time around gardens, but having their own vegetable and fruit gardens would probably have been a new experience for them, as for many of the other settlers from urban backgrounds. The New Zealand Company was quick to organise the formation of the Wellington Horticultural Society to encourage settlers to take up gardening, and the first horticultural exhibition was held in January 1842. Sarah’s view of gardening below probably owes more to my brown-thumbed approach than anything else, but you can be sure that William would have taken a highly scientific route! With none of the environmental protection controls that we have nowadays, all sorts of seeds were sent out from England, with mixed results. Some quite innocuous English hedge-row plants adapted rather enthusiastically to the New Zealand climate and are now treated as noxious pests.

G is for garden. The garden was William’s latest project. Neither of them knew the first thing about gardening, but it was the expected thing here, to start your own garden as soon as you had a bit of land you could call your own. People were getting seeds sent out from home, and she was always being offered them, or cuttings or bulbs. William took a very scientific approach, with labels, and notes in a small book, but she just did what she was told and followed whatever instructions she was given. She doubted the survival of the funny little things and waited without much hope, but with a willingness to be surprised when something green pushed its way through the soil towards the light.

Sarah’s younger brother Henry was born when she was 14, so she would have played a major role in caring for him when he was young. He was always referred to as her little blind brother. The 1851 census has a column for listing whether each individual is “blind, or deaf and dumb” – Henry is not marked as such. However in the 1871 census, where the choices are “deaf-and-dumb; blind; imbecile or idiot; or lunatic” a note against Henry’s name says “blind from small boy”. In an 1844 letter, Sarah’s mother says “Poor Henry is trying to improve that he may be capable of writing to you himself before long and then he has a deal to say”, which suggests that while his sight may be poor, he is not completely blind. Henry then adds a few sloping lines of his own to the bottom of the letter. Many years later, Sarah’s father tells of how Henry preaches in the market-place in Barking from his book of “Moon’s raised type”. He goes on to say, “Oh Sarah, if you could see him standing up declaring the Gospel to falling men – only to think a few years back you watched over him in bed diseased with a loathsome disease”. The most likely of the loathsome diseases that could have caused blindness in a child at that time was measles.

H is for Henry. She missed him dreadfully, her little brother Henry. He was the dearest of all her brothers and sisters. When she and William married, they hadn’t wanted a big fuss, and so Henry had been her only family at the church. He had been five then, and afterwards, he had cried because he didn’t want his big sister to go away. They had both cried a lot more when the passage to New Zealand had been confirmed. She had wanted to take Henry with them, but her parents and William had persuaded her that New Zealand would be no place for a blind boy. If anything happened to them, he wouldn’t be able to manage on his
own, and who would there be to take him in? She knew they were right, but his absence was always with her, like the gap between two of her back teeth. Her tongue would always seek out the hole, looking for the tooth that had once been there. Her mind was like that with Henry, always prodding at the gap where he had been in her life. And every time she asked herself, was it something that she did, or didn’t do, when she was nursing him through the illness, that caused the damage to his eyes?

I remembered Sarah’s father mentioning in a letter that she had been born in London, so I went back to the letter and checked. In fact, it was Dorset Street in Spitalfields, so I Googled it and discovered it was pretty much the worst street in London. I’m waiting on an interloan from the library of a book about the street, which is actually called The Worst Street in London. Among other things, long after Sarah’s time, Jack the Ripper murdered one of his victims in an alley off Dorset Street! Anyway, this piece of information asks more questions than it answers – like why were Sarah’s parents living there? Why did they move to Ilford?

I is for Ilford. She had thought that she would spend her whole life in Ilford, or at least nearby. She hadn’t been born there; she was born in one of the worst streets in London, not that she remembered life amongst the immigrants and doss-houses. She had imagined marriage and a family of her own, but always there, with her own family close at hand, not on the other side of the world. Would she ever see Ilford and her family again?

"Jam" is about all the things the early settlers didn’t have…

J is for jam. She missed jam. And honey. And marmalade. There wasn’t enough fruit yet for any but the earliest of the settlers to be making jam, and there were no bees for honey. All those lovely jars and jars of jam that had filled her larder at home – plum, raspberry, strawberry – she had given them all to her mother when they packed for New Zealand, not wanting to risk the extra weight and possible breakage. Now jam was an imported luxury, an occasional purchase when she had spare house-keeping money, kept for special occasions. She craved
the taste of something sweet.

Another imagined episode from Sarah’s pregnancy with Oscar.

K is for kick. Dear heaven, how this baby could kick. It seemed to be doing it for its own amusement. Rubbing her stomach just made it worse, as if it was trying to reach through to her hand. The other night, she had rested her saucer on the bulge while she drank her tea, thinking it safe, the baby dormant. It was just lurking in wait though, and with one almighty kick, sent the saucer flying. Fortunately it didn’t break – she didn’t have china to spare, and when William asked for a repeat performance because he didn’t quite believe it, she had told him rather tartly to fetch one of the tin plates they had used on the ship. He had placed it quite gingerly on the bump, and was rewarded a minute or so later with a satisfying clatter as the plate sprang up and slid to the floor.

Happy birthday!

On 1 November 1842, in a house on Lambton Quay somewhere in the vicinity of the present bus station, Sarah gave birth to her second child, Oscar Alfred Norgrove. Oscar was the first of the Norgrove children born in New Zealand. Today is also the birthday of his great-great-grandson, my nephew Cody, who is 6 – happy birthday Oscar and Cody!

We don’t know very much about Oscar when he was 6, or at any other time during his childhood. He was nine days old when a fire broke out soon after midnight at the Lloyd’s bakery on Lambton Quay. The fire spread quickly among the wooden buildings, and although it headed south and east, towards Te Aro pa, William took his young family up onto Wellington Terrace to be safe. Sarah makes mention of this story in a poem she wrote for her children – I suppose it was an unforgettable night for her, waiting on the hill in the small hours of the morning with a sleepy toddler and a new-born baby. She doesn’t say so, but William had probably gone to join the other settlers, local Maori, and the crew of several ships in harbour in fighting the fire. She would have been mightily relieved to go home in the morning, with William safe. Although many houses were destroyed, no-one was hurt in the fire.

The family moved to Blenheim in 1861, and Oscar seems to have taken up painting and wall-papering as his trade. By then, he was the eldest son, his older brother Ovid having died of tuberculosis three years earlier. In 1878 Oscar married Edith Brook, and their first child (my grandfather) was born later that year. Two girls and two more boys followed at tidy two year intervals.

Apparently Oscar was bright, very bright, scary-genius bright, and was given to tinkering around and coming up with new inventions. There was some concern in the family that he was insane, because some of his inventions seemed pretty wacky and way out for the time. The concern reached a whole new level in March 1888 when Oscar was committed to the Wellington Lunatic Asylum. The Marlborough Express reported :

LUNACY – Oscar Norgrove was committed to the Wellington Lunatic Asylum on Saturday by Mr Allen RM, Drs Cleghorn and Nairn having certified to his being insane. The poor fellow brought to our office a few days ago some models, very cleverly designed, with which he had been working out the theory of perpetual motion. Great sympathy is felt for his family.

I’m sure it was just wonderful for his family to have this announced to the whole town. His father had died two years previously, so was spared the sight of his son being carted off to the loony bin, but mother Sarah was still alive. Poor Edith was probably eyeing the kids and wondering if the insanity was hereditary (it doesn’t seem to have been – we’re all just fine, thanks!)

Although the modern view of nineteenth century definitions of insanity seems to be that the men in white coats carted off anyone who was a bit different, the reality of mental health care in New Zealand at this time wasn’t like that at all. Lunatic asylums didn’t differentiate between those who were mentally ill – treatable and with hope of recovery – and those who were mentally impaired from birth defect, accident or alcoholism. All were lumped in together. An ideal existed of providing a quiet haven with steady routines and therapeutic manual work, but by late in the century the asylums were becoming overcrowded. The country had a large population of early settlers who had never married. These men were aging, and many had mental health problems brought on by alcoholism, as well as age-related disorders. With nowhere else for them to go, the asylums had to take them in and care for them till they died. Wellington Lunatic Asylum (on the site now occupied by Government House) was probably less overcrowded than some in 1888, as the Porirua Asylum had opened the previous year.

Whatever Oscar’s problem was, it had to have been pretty serious if his large extended family couldn’t manage to look after him. It had to have been more than a matter of being misunderstood for his way-out ideas. Whether as a result of treatment or on his own, he seems to have recovered. I’m not sure when he was released (haven’t yet found the newspaper article trumpeting the return of his sanity), but by 1891 he was back in Blenheim, painting the parsonage.

In 1892, the Marlborough Express reprinted a letter titled “A New Zealand Inventor” from an Australian newspaper which makes it pretty clear that Oscar was indeed a clever chap. The writer of the letter (“FM” of Levin) had seen a newspaper article about someone in England who had patented a design for a boat with three keels, and that the admiralty intended to have some vessels constructed on the design. The inventor had apparently derived his idea from the albatross. “FM” went on to say :

I wish to call the attention of the public, through your paper, to the fact that the original inventor is Mr Oscar Norgrove, of Blenheim, Marlborough, New Zealand; that he constructed a model, which I saw, with plans, which he forwarded to the Admiralty, and that he stated at the time that he had derived the idea from the movements of the albatross. He has been a most enterprising man, and I think should have the credit of his invention, if not the profit. He forwarded the model, &c, about two years ago, while th[is] patent is quite
recent. Models and plans will be found in his possession on inquiry.

Now here’s the only photograph I have of Oscar, posing in front of the house in
Manse Road with Edith, Edgar and Bertha. Judging by the size of the children, the photo would have been taken in the late 1880s. When Mum gave me the photo, she told me Oscar was holding one of his inventions. The photo has faded badly, and between the cricket cap and a beard of old testament proportions, it’s pretty hard to see what Oscar looks like. But it sure looks to me that what he’s holding is a pair of model-size trimaran hulls!

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……………..

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?

First names

The annual list of most popular baby names has just been released by the Department of Internal Affairs. The old-fashioned and Biblical names are clearly still trendy with modern parents - Jack, James, Joshua, Daniel and William for boys and Sophie, Olivia, Emma, Charlotte and Emily for girls. Good to see that none of the mis-spelled variants that I see so often in the local birth notices (Shavaughn, Makayla) are in wide-spread use - are these people trying to be different or are they just plain ignorant? Anyway, I've been on a baby name quest myself lately, trying to figure out why William and Sarah called their second-born Oscar. It might seem like a suitably old-fashoned name, but it turns out that in 1842, Oscar was not even remotely trendy. There weren't any great literary Oscars, no well-known public figure Oscars, and definitely no family Oscars that I can find. There weren't even any Oscars in Wellington in 1842, not among the jury-qualified, electoral-franchise-holding males. The occasional Oskar turns up amongst the Scandinavian immigrants, but I can't see any connection to my family.


So, as my Mum asked, why does it matter to me to know why my great-grandfather was named Oscar? To tell Sarah's story, I've got a bunch of facts (including the names of all the kids) but the bare, discoverable facts alone aren't the whole story. If I've got to write fiction in the gaps between the facts, it has to be logical fiction - it has to be appropriate to the context of the time, the place, the people. It has to matter - and things like baby name choices matter a great deal to parents, in 1842 and 2008. There's a lot of thought put into it, usually a fair bit of debate and discussion. Logically, this happened when William and Sarah chose names for each of their children - Ovid certainly wasn't named for some forebear; and Gertrude was definitely named after the ship that carried the family to Wellington. They chose Oscar for a reason, and while I can figure out the likely story behind Ovid and Gertrude, I'm stumped on Oscar. (And after that I've got Horace, Emma, Walter, Kate, Zoe, Alice and Sidney to go!)