Mother's milk or Adam's ale?

Or, to ask the question another way, booze or water? In a recent writing adventure, I had the opportunity to write about William bung-eyed on booze, which is something I’d never considered before. I’ve mentioned several times the possibility that The Thistle was William’s “local”, given its proximity to their early Wellington home, but I’d never really thought about what part alcohol might have played in William and Sarah’s lives.

Reading about the Victorians, both in England and New Zealand, you get the impression of a society completely awash on alcohol. Drunkenness was prevalent in both societies; urban working class in England appear to have dealt with the problems of filthy undrinkable water, appalling living conditions and general despair by self-medicating in the extreme. Not that drinking was restricted to the working class – all classes seem to have enjoyed their drink; although drunkenness, as viewed by the early temperance movement, was a problem of the working class.

The settlers in New Zealand weren’t short of booze either. Within a few months of settlement, Wellington had seven pubs on the Thorndon side of the harbour and five on the Petone side. Alcohol formed a substantial portion of the cargo of every arriving vessel. Early cases heard by the Police Magistrate were generally all charges against drunk and disorderly citizens. The binge drinking culture was alive and well in New Zealand from the beginning.

You don’t want to think that your forebears were drunken sots, any more than you want to consider the possibility that they were racists or wife-beaters, but things which might be considered unacceptable now were just a normal part of life back then. Alcohol certainly was – there was a strong do-it-yourself culture of making fruit wines, grogs and punches, and medicine and alcohol were almost indistinguishable from each other. Recipes abounded for home-made beer, mead and wine, and some of the ingredients, not to mention the alcohol content, are downright scary. Fancy some Pepper Punch?

Take 25 small fresh green peppers, 2 ½ pounds of loaf sugar, 10 tablespoons of lime juice and 2 ounces of green ginger. Boil for 10 minutes in 18 pints of water, then add 8 pints of rum. When cold, bottle and cork tightly. Tie down the corks. Keep bottled as long as you like – in ten days it will be up.

Rhubarb champagne? Fermented rhubarb stalks, sugar and a little yeast, topped off with a bottle of whisky – yowee! Trouble sleeping? Here’s a nightcap to put you right out – for one serving simmer half a pint of ale, add nutmeg, sugar and brandy, and drink last thing before getting into bed. As for proprietary medicines bought over the counter, they were chock-full of alcohol, or even better, opium derivatives – and used for everything from coughs and colds to digestive problems. Not only that, but they were given freely to babies and children; nobody batted an eyelid about giving a fractious child a wee tot of something to get it to stop crying and go to sleep.

So what about William and Sarah? Drunken sots or abstainers? I’ve got no evidence either way; it’s the absence of evidence that leads me to draw the conclusion that they were probably moderate drinkers. Here’s my reasoning : family oral history would probably have included a mention – things like “your [great-great] grandmother never touched a drop of alcohol in her life” or “William drank all the profits from the business” are the sort of things you would expect to hear if they were either abstainers or heavy drinkers.

I did wonder whether Sarah might have been a non-drinker because she came from a Baptist family. Although later in the nineteenth century the Baptists were heavily involved in the temperance movement, in the early part of the century it was a matter of personal choice. Sarah tells us that her cousin sent a bottle of home-made wine for the wedding breakfast when she and William married, so that suggests that alcohol was drunk in her family, although possibly just for special occasions.

The stricture against drinking during pregnancy is reasonably modern – or at least, the scientific evidence of the damage it can cause the unborn child has only emerged in the last few decades. It certainly wouldn’t have been a consideration in the mid-nineteenth century. Nevertheless, eight of Sarah’s ten children survived childhood, and by all accounts were robustly healthy. There’s no evidence of anything resembling foetal alcohol syndrome, even at the mildest end of the scale. In fact, there’s strong evidence that Oscar and Horace were exceptionally intelligent, so even if Sarah did consume alcohol during pregnancy, it clearly wasn’t to excess.

Then there’s William. It’s always possible that alcohol could have been a reason for his repeated business failures, but it seems unlikely. For one thing, the newspapers of the time didn’t hold back in their reporting – if William had drunk the profits, it would have appeared in the local rag in the guise of sympathy for his wife and family. Not only that, but there would have been a few appearances before the magistrate as drunk and disorderly – these were all faithfully reported by the newspapers of the time, and William’s name never crops up.

On the other hand, William suffered from gout in later life, and good living and alcohol are often contributors to the development of this condition. Photographs of him in old age certainly suggest someone who lived well. However, chronic lead exposure is also a risk factor for gout, and as both a plumber and painter, William’s exposure lead would have been high and ongoing through most of his working life.

Sarah’s father also suffered from gout – in a letter to her in 1875, he advises that he has “found more relief from gin than anything”, but then goes on to say he “used it taking off my shoe and having it on my Stocking 2 or 3 times a Day”, and recommended that William try it!

Probably the single most important determining factor for the Norgroves was money. In the early days (and even later times when things weren’t going well), alcohol would have been an occasional treat – beer or wine on an important social occasion, and a little medicinal brandy in the cupboard. Perhaps even some stout for Sarah when she was breast-feeding, to help build her up. In the 1840s, they might have lived right below the pub, but William wouldn’t have been dropping in every night after work because they simply couldn’t afford it. With greater prosperity would have come greater indulgence – maybe a beer after work, or some sherry in the evening, with wine for special meals.

In terms of writing William and Sarah’s story, a complete absence of alcohol from the story would require explanation, and there isn’t one – there’s no evidence for abstinence. Likewise, heavy alcohol consumption to the point where it affected every day life would tell a completely different story than the one I have here, and again, there’s no evidence for it. A careful balance is required, to show a moderate use of alcohol as appropriate to the family’s changing financial circumstances, without making it seem anything out of the ordinary.

Was William a sensitive new-age guy?

In my last post, William came through the door with a cup and saucer in one hand, and a plate in the other. Since then, Tara has questioned whether a Victorian man would even think of doing something so domestic as making tea and toast for his wife, let alone know how to do it. Would William have known how much tea to put in the pot and how to hold a toasting fork, or by having him do this, am I turning him into a sensitive new-age man of the 21st century?

Trust me, you’re not going to see William changing nappies or washing dishes. He’s the head of the household, and he wears the pants. In this particular situation though, there are a number of things which have gone before which make this response to Sarah’s morning sickness possible.

First of all, William was from a working class family, and his mother was a single parent from the time he was 11. Children like him were expected to help out around the house, and although the burden fell more heavily on daughters, in William’s case he was an only child until he was 15. So he would have helped his mother with chores around the house – as he became older, taking on the heavier chores of chopping and stacking firewood, carrying water perhaps, but chances are he would have made his fair share of tea and toast, even if he didn’t do dishes or cook.

William and Sarah got married on a Sunday and he would have gone back to work the next day. The honeymoon period would have been the first months together in their little house, getting to know each other as husband and wife. It would have been a very different lifestyle than what either had known previously – just the two of them, playing house together. You can imagine Sarah’s delight in setting up her new home the way she wanted, and looking forward to William coming home from work every night. She would have missed her parents, brothers and sisters, although probably not all the work that would have fallen to her as the eldest daughter. She and William were young and in love, and you know what that’s like – they would have been falling all over themselves to please each other, and showing their affection in taking care of each other.

By my reckoning, Sarah fell pregnant with Ovid on her wedding night, or within a few days of it, so they would barely have got used to being a couple when they discovered they were going to become a family. I would imagine that the first time Sarah started the day with a bout of morning sickness, William would have been running around doing whatever he could to help her feel better; if she said dry toast might help, I think he would have gone off and made it for her. After that, though, Sarah’s sense of duty would probably have seen her get out of bed, no matter how wretched she felt, and get on with taking care of her husband. If she was really ill and unable to manage, then I would think one of her younger sisters would have been drafted to do the cooking and nursing. But that first morning, I can just see him anxiously offering everything he could to help Sarah feel better.

Then there’s the five month sea voyage to New Zealand to consider. On board ship, everyone was out of their normal environment; there were new ways of doing the simplest things, like cooking and washing clothes. The men didn’t have their usual work to go off to – for working class men, five months with nothing to do would have seemed very strange. Many of the men worked alongside the sailors on the sails, just for something to do. Likewise, they helped out with the domestic chores in the steerage. Passengers were divided into messes of six for rations and cooking. This was six full adults, so a mess group could actually have consisted of four adults and four children aged between two and fifteen (counted as half portions). Mess-mates took turns at drawing the weekly rations and taking the prepared food to the galley for cooking. While the women may have been the main preparers of the food, the men were involved as well – a blurring of gender roles born of necessity. It gave the men something to do, and in some cases, they might not have had much choice, if for example, a wife was sea-sick, or had her hands full dealing with small children. It’s not hard to imagine a chap volunteering to peel the spuds and make the tea, if only to avoid having to change nappies and mop up after sea-sick children.

I think the five months at sea would have had an effect on the family dynamics that you wouldn’t see in families that didn’t emigrate. For William and Sarah, it would have affected their relationship with Ovid – both because he was the only one of all their children to share the adventure of the journey, but also because it put William in 24/7 contact with his son and his wife in a way that would never have happened in England. Even if William wasn’t fully hands-on with the nappy-changing and bathing like modern dads, he would have seen it and been around it in a way that wouldn’t have happened if he had been working 10-12 hours a day, six days a week. William would have seen aspects of Ovid’s growth that he might otherwise have missed – perhaps even the boy’s first steps. Even if he spent as much time as possible on deck, playing sailors, or sketching or chatting with the other men, he would still have spent more time with Sarah than their previous way of life allowed. So I see it as likely that he would have had a degree of sensitivity towards her needs and feelings that he might not otherwise have had.

Sarah herself tells us that when they landed at Kaiwharawhara, it was William who built the fire and boiled the water for the first cup of tea, saying to the men around him that they all needed to take care of their children and wives. That was his first priority – he didn’t go haring off into the bush to explore, or sit around waiting for Sarah to wait on him.

So those are my reasons for thinking that the morning sickness scene could have played out as I wrote it. All of William’s loving and tender feelings towards Sarah in those moments would have been expressed in action – he would have needed to do something. Right then, right there, he knew that tea and toast was the answer for her, so he did it, and I can see him dancing around the fire in his nightshirt, delighted at the prospect of a new baby. On the days that followed, however, I would imagine duty reasserting itself in Sarah, and her going back to getting up and getting on, no matter how she felt. William’s need for action would have seen him turn to things like making furniture - a bedside table, a cradle, perhaps. Not a sensitive new age guy, but perhaps a little more sensitive than other men of his time.

Morning sickness

Long time, no blog – I’ve been writing the story more than researching, although the research continues behind the scenes. So I thought I’d post a chunk of the story which I shared with writing friends in a recent sharing on the general theme of life and death. I was so worn out by reading all the harrowing death scenes that my talented friends produced that I felt the need to lighten things a little with some new life.

This is from fairly early on – around late February 1842. The family is still living in the 3-room mud-floored whare on Thorndon Flat. Back in October I speculated at great length on the most likely candidate for the shipmate with whom the Norgroves shared this palace, concluding it was most likely one of the younger single men or the ship’s matron and her son. However, for story purposes, I needed Sarah to have a friend, so that impressions about the new country could be shared in conversations between them. Out of the scrum of women waiting for the privy on the first night in the immigration barracks, Sophia Mannering emerged as Sarah’s new best friend. I realise I’ve appropriated someone else’s great-great grandmother here, but for all intents and purposes, Sophia and John Mannering and their unnamed daughter disappeared after arriving in New Zealand. John doesn’t appear on the burgess or electoral rolls, they don’t get mentioned in newspaper articles or advertisements, they just don’t appear in any of the usual places you go looking. So I’ve moved Sophia and daughter in with the Norgroves while John goes up country looking for work.

It came on with an unexpectedness that shocked her. One minute she was starting her morning climb out of the saggy hammock of their bed; the next she was dizzy and retching, nausea sweeping up her body in a sweaty wave. Her mouth was suddenly full of saliva and she clawed her way over the edge of the bedstead and groped desperately for the handle of the chamber-pot. Her stomach heaved, and she spat the bitterness into the pot before retching miserably again and again, bringing up nothing but the acid juices of an empty stomach. When it finally stopped, she was shaking, eyes streaming with tears, her body cold with sweat.

“Sarah! My dear, are you all right?” William’s voice came anxiously from the other side of the bed.

She put the pot carefully on the floor and swiped the back of her hand across her mouth, then leaned back against the pillows and closed her eyes. “Never better,” she croaked. “Must have been the pork last night. Do you feel unwell?”

“Not at all.” He moved to look at her more closely, and his shifting weight caused her to roll back into the hollow at the centre of the bed. She fought back another wave of sickness with an audible groan.

"Sorry," he said, and the bed shifted again, flattening this time as he slid towards the edge. Through narrowed eyes she watched him throw back the covers and hasten around to her side of the bed. He looked perfectly, unfairly, robustly healthy. She closed her eyes again, heard the tink of china against wood as he moved the chamber pot out of the way.

“I’m fine,” he said. “I could eat a horse for breakfast.”

Breakfast? The nausea roiled up in her again, and she fought it back, closing her eyes and rolling away from him to curl around herself.

“You really don’t look good.” She felt William’s weight in the pull of the bedclothes as he sat down cautiously on the very edge of the bed, and the warmth of his hand on her shoulder, his thumb gently stroking in a way that made her want to cry. “If it’s not last night’s dinner, then what could be making you sick?”

What indeed? A suspicion was growing on her, a small voice in her mind pointing out that her monthly visitor was two weeks late. It had never been quite regular before Ovid, but since she had had him, she had often gone two or three weeks longer than she thought she should. But then, those times she hadn't started the day with a bout of nausea and retching.

William seemed to have reached the same conclusion, although probably by a different route.

“Dearest! I suppose you could be, that we - could it be that we might expect a happy event in several months?” The hand on her shoulder squeezed gently, demanding an answer.

“It could be.” She turned back to him and opened her eyes to see him smiling.

“Our first little New Zealander,” he exclaimed. “Oh, my dear girl, now we’re really putting down roots in our new
home.”

Her stomach lurched and she swallowed hard. “William, it’s too early to be sure. It might come to nothing.”

“I’m sure,” he said firmly. “You were just the same with Ovid.”

She said nothing, remembering how it had been the first time, when they realised she was to have a baby. They had been surprised at first that it had happened so quickly; even a little disappointed that they would have so little time with just the two of them. Overwhelmingly though, they had been happy. Laughing, giddy and silly with it sometimes, but happy.

“I’ll get you some tea.” He bounced off the bed. “And some dry toast,” he added from the doorway. “Last time you always felt much better after a little dry toast.”

Tea would be good. Tea would wash the bitter taste out of her mouth. She closed her eyes again and listened to the regular morning chorus, birds going happily about their day, and a distant rooster proclaiming ascendancy over his hen-folk. From the cooking fire outside came a clattering and a cheerful whistling, as William stirred up the embers and shifted the warm kettle over the flames. If William was a rooster, he would be crowing right now. So where was her happiness?

She rolled back onto her side, curling herself around the tiny weight of her womb. She was young and healthy, and it was all perfectly normal and natural. But there was always a dark shadow hovering, one that would get bigger and more terrifying as the months went on. Every woman she knew felt it. You tried as hard as you could to imagine yourself with the new baby, but you could also see a different outcome, one where the Lord took you and left your children motherless and your husband struggling to cope. And to be here, thousands of miles from everything familiar, Mama not here to help her and reassure her like last time. She wanted her so badly right then, but she might never see her again. A tear slid down her cheek and onto the pillow, and then another slipped over the bridge of her nose to join it, and she stuffed her face into the pillow and let them come, hot and fast, trying not to sob aloud because she didn’t want to wake Ovid and she didn’t want William to hear. She wanted to go home, she wanted her mother, she wanted…

“Sarah, William said you were unwell.” Sophia’s voice came softly from the doorway. “Sarah dear, what is it?”

Sarah took a deep breath, sniffed mightily, and scrubbed her eyes with the sleeve of her night-gown. She rolled cautiously onto her back, and swallowed hard to convince any lingering sickness to stay where it was. Sophia’s concerned face hovered inches from her own.

“Nothing, really. I'm fine.”

That didn’t sound especially convincing, even to her. Her friend frowned and reached for her hand. “Sarah, I heard you being sick. It’s hard not to, with the walls so thin and…,” her voice faded away. She started again. “You’re unwell. Is there anything I can do?”

Sophia squeezed her hand tightly, and Sarah felt some of the tension leave her in a great sigh. Thank goodness she had Sophia, even if she didn’t have her mother. She felt herself start to smile - she couldn’t help it, even if she knew she must look rather sheepish.

“I think it’s the nine-month illness,” she said and watched confusion, surprise and pleasure change her friend’s face. “Too early to be sure, but as William just reminded me, I was the same with Ovid from the start.”

“A baby. Well, you must have expected it soon enough - Ovid has been weaned a few months now.”

“I suppose, in the back of my mind.”

“But why were you crying? Are you not happy to be having another child?”

“Shh. William mustn’t know. It was just silly. Missing my mother.”

Sophia looked at her shrewdly and Sarah knew she suspected that there was more to it than that. She had the tact to leave it alone, however, knowing William could come back into the room at any time.

“Well then, so how long did the sickness last with Ovid? Was it just in the mornings?”

“Mmmm. Mornings, for the best part of three months. I just needed to get some dry toast and a cup of tea down as soon as I could, and after that I would be fine.”

“Ah, so that’s why he’s banging around with the kettle. Maybe I should go and give him a hand, make sure he doesn’t burn the toast in all his excitement.” Sophia smiled wickedly. “He certainly looked very pleased with himself.”

“So it would seem. He can manage the toast though - stay with me?” She patted the bed beside her in an invitation to sit.

Sophia settled down with an expectant smile. “So. I know there’s months to go, but what do you think? Boy or girl?”

“Don’t know. My mother was always sick - didn’t matter if it was a boy or a girl, so I don’t think it signifies anything. A little girl would be nice, like your Charlotte.”

“A boy would be a play-mate for Ovid, though.”

“Mama?” Hearing his name, Ovid spoke up from his cot on the other side of the room. Sarah wondered how long he had been awake, and moved cautiously to get up to him.

“I’ll go,” said Sophia, suiting action to words and getting up. “Morning Ovid. Come and give your Mama a kiss.“ She lifted him up out of his blankets and carried him across to the bed.

“Hullo Mama!” He scrambled across the bed to plant a damp kiss on her cheek. She pulled him against her, hugging him tightly, and he burrowed into her side. Her stomach lurched and she pulled away from him. His head popped up to stare questioningly at her, and she pressed kisses into his hair, inhaling his fusty, small boy sleep smell. Her other hand went to his behind, checking the napkin for dampness.

“Wet?”

“Mmmm. Too soon to expect him to stay dry through the night. No, Ovid-“

“Come here Baby. Mama isn’t well and bouncing on her won’t make her feel better.” Sophia scooped the little boy up again. “I’ll take care of this for you,” she added to Sarah, with a pat on Ovid’s rear.

“Thank you.” The boy’s enthusiastic greeting had set off the nausea that she had so carefully tamped down, and with its return came the dark shadow. "Sophia... if I should, if the Lord - oh, if anything goes wrong, you will look after him for me, won't you?"

Sophia looked at her over Ovid's head, her chin resting on his hair, her grey eyes solemn. "Of course I will. But I don't expect to need to, and it's far too soon to be thinking thoughts like that, Sarah. You'll make yourself really ill." Her expression changed; she looked wistful, envious even. "This is supposed to be happy news for you." She turned to take Ovid out of the room as William came through the door with a cup and saucer in one hand, and a plate in the other. He had gone out to the cooking fire in nightshirt and bare feet, and Sarah almost laughed at the sight of him, covered in smuts of wood-ash, his hair standing on end and a wide grin across his unshaven face.

“Papa!” Ovid squirmed in Sophia’s arms, expecting his father’s attention, but William barely spared him a glance as he focused anxiously on Sarah.

“Hullo Baby,” he said absently, brushing past on the way to the bed. “Here you are, my dear. Are you feeling any better?” He sat down on the bed beside her, careful not to spill the tea. “Which do you want first?” he asked, offering both.

“A sip of tea, I think,” she said, reaching for the cup and saucer. She could smell it, rich and strong but with plenty of milk, just the way she liked it. Her stomach seemed to find the delectable aroma acceptable, so she took a cautious sip.

“I’m going to have to build a little table to go beside the bed, so you’ve got somewhere to put these in the morning,” William said, indicating plate and saucer.

She took a bigger sip, swilled it around her mouth and swallowed gratefully.

“I quite like the idea of having you sit there every morning, holding things for me."

He grinned at her. “Your butler is here to oblige. Does your ladyship require anything else?”

That made her laugh. “I think I’d like to try a bite of toast now, thank you.”

He held a piece of the toast to her mouth, and she took a small bite and chewed slowly. William watched her carefully, ready to leap out of the way and grab the chamber pot if it proved necessary. She swallowed the toast, took another sip of tea and checked with her stomach. The queasiness seemed to be subsiding.

“It seems to be working,” she said, and saw the relief in his eyes as she picked up the piece of toast and took another bite. She was quite relieved as well. If the tea and toast hadn’t made her feel better, she wasn’t sure what she would have done. Still, the real test would come when she went to stand up.

For the birds

I spent Friday afternoon at Zealandia, the wildlife sanctuary in the old Karori reservoir in Wellington. My friend Jill was visiting from Christchurch and was keen to go there. Luckily we struck one of the few reasonable days we’ve had in the last month, and actually saw some sunshine. Zealandia is all about creating a protected environment that gets a close to pre-human New Zealand as possible. Given that the country is very short on native mammals, that means mostly birds, insects and lizards.

Walking along the muddy tracks through the bush was a trip back in time for me to how the bush must have seemed to William and Sarah. The early settlers were particularly taken by the abundant bird-life in New Zealand, as it was all new to them. There were none of the familiar English birds, not even the common sparrow, which didn’t arrive until 1866. For most of the settlers , the other astounding thing about New Zealand was that unlike in England, they were free to roam around and hunt, shoot, snare and eat the wildlife without risking being taken as poachers.

And eat the wildlife they certainly did. Written accounts of life and exploration in New Zealand in the 1840s read like a menu of today’s extinct and endangered birds. The kereru, or wood pigeon, perhaps, is understandable – seeing them around here, flying with all the grace and speed of the old Bristol Freighters – they would be an easy target and it’s not hard to imagine they might be finger-licking good in a hangi with some potatoes and kumera. But it’s shocking to read, for example, Edward Jerningham Wakefield’s description of the tui :

it resembles a blackbird in size and plumage, with two graceful bunches of white feathers under the neck. It abounds in the woods, and is remarkably noisy and active. Its most common note is a mixture of two or three graduated notes on a flute, a sneeze, and a sharp whistle; but it imitates almost every feathered inhabitant of the forest, and, when domesticated, every noise it hears

followed by the comment : “It is of a particularly sweet flavour, and very tender”.

Today conservationists like those at Zealandia work hard to provide refuges and breeding programmes for endangered species. Many of the birds that were so plentiful in the 1840s are endangered or extinct now; even back then, both Maori and naturalist alike were aware that some species were already extinct or very rare. But your average citizen of the 1840s, both pakeha and Maori, would not have imagined or even particularly cared that indiscriminate hunting might wipe out several species of birds.

So it seems this is yet another area where I have to find a balance – it’s the challenge of accurately re-creating a historical setting and lifestyle, without overly offending modern sensibilities. While it might be distasteful to imagine William and Sarah tucking into a feed of kereru from time to time, it’s very likely that they did, especially in the early years. There weren’t a lot of other poultry options as a change from pork and beef – the few chickens around were kept for eggs, and only found their way to the pot once they had stopped laying. Kereru were ridiculously easy to catch, and might have even been available to purchase from local Maori.

And, let’s face it, those early Victorians were far more used than we are to their food being close to its source. If Sarah cooked chicken (or pigeon), she wouldn’t have bought it skinned and boned, portion-sized, shrink-wrapped and labelled with nutritional information. She would have caught it and killed it, or bought the whole critter and plucked it herself. Apparently we’d be a whole lot healthier if we all followed the great-great grandma diet – which basically goes, if g-g-grandma wouldn’t recognise it as food, then don’t buy it or eat it – just think how much of the contents of the local supermarket would be a complete mystery to Sarah…

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.

Te Rauparaha and Queen Victoria

Still sharing Sarah’s alphabet – S through to V today.

S is for ship. She had never seen a ship before they arrived at the Gravesend docks, and now, after five months spent in one reaching New Zealand, ships were such a big part of her life, as they were to all of the immigrants. What ships had arrived was the big news of any day; which ships were leaving, and where they were bound was the subject of many a conversation, not to mention letters hastily scrawled in hopes of catching the mail. Which ships were long expected and still not heard of, what fate might have befallen them and their hopeful passengers were frequently discussed, and all the useful and important things in their holds, like letters from home, and marmalade and linen were the cause of much speculation. Where once she had looked out the window of her house onto the bricks of an Ilford street, she now looked out on a vast harbour forested with masts. The flags and sailors’ washing fluttering from the rigging gave the town a festive look, as if every day was market day. The comings and goings of the ships’ boats and the native canoes provided endless entertainment for her and for Ovid, who liked to call himself a sailor-man and pretend to be rowing in his bath.

I’m sure that if Sarah really did have a close encounter of the Te Rauparaha kind, we’d know all about it. But it’s certainly likely that in the early 1840s, prior to the Wairau incident, the Norgroves did seem him in street, especially since they lived just below the pub which was reputedly the old chief’s favourite watering hole. He would have been in his 70s by this time, and although his reputation makes him seem 8 foot tall, it was a great surprise to me to find out that he was actually less than 5 feet in height. So this little piece is pure fiction from Sarah’s point of view.

T is for Te Rauparaha. The old chief was a fearsome sight with his heavily tattooed face and body. Everyone knew when he had come to Wellington because his canoe would be drawn up on the beach just below the corner of Lambton Quay and Mulgrave St – Te Rauparaha liked to do his drinking at the Thistle Inn, the pub just behind and above their house. She had managed to avoid encountering him until this afternoon, when she and Ovid were walking back up the beach from visiting Eliza Plimmer. Ovid took one look at the terrifying old man and his entourage, shrieked and buried himself in her skirts. Te Rauparaha had laughed, and walked over to her. She pushed Ovid behind her, and raised her parasol defensively, wishing with all her hammering heart that she had someone’s skirts to hide in herself. Te Rauparaha pushed her parasol gently aside with his carved wooden staff. “I don’t eat little English boys,” he said, baring surprisingly white teeth at her. “Or their mothers.” He didn’t wait for an answer, just stomped on down the beach to his canoe. She stood still with complete shock, not just because he had spoken to her, or even because of what he had said, but because he had stood eye to eye with her. From all the stories about the mighty warrior, she had assumed he would be a giant of a man, but the truth was, he was no taller than her.

Everywhere in Wellington seems to be uphill from where you are, and when you occasionally go downhill, it’s often just as hard as going up, especially in the wind. The extreme hilliness of the town came as a bit of a shock to the early settlers, but they adapted, figured out construction techniques to make houses cling to the hillsides, and got around as nimbly as mountain goats.

U is for uphill. The whole town was surrounded by hills, and everywhere she walked, she always seemed to be going uphill. At first she had to keep stopping to catch her breath; now she must be more used to it, because she could get all the way up Wellington Terrace without stopping to lean and gasp on someone’s fence. If only their fortunes would strengthen in the same way, so that they didn’t always seem to be struggling uphill, and gasping, when it came to money.

I was quite struck to find that Sarah and Victoria were fairly close in age. Funny thing, because it runs in the family – Mum and her sister are of similar ages to the present Queen; Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret Rose were a kind of gold standard for them when they were young. And the late Diana, Princess of Wales was only a month or two older than me – and our lives couldn’t have been more different. So I wondered if Sarah followed the news about Victoria in the same way as we did about our respective royals…

V is for Victoria. Queen Victoria was born just one day short of a year after her own birth. The closeness in age meant that Sarah had always felt a connection to her, a sisterly concern, despite the vast difference in their social circumstances. The parallels were heightened when Victoria married Prince Albert not long after Sarah married William. Ovid was born, and then a few months later, Princess Victoria. Fond mother though she was, Sarah had no great hopes of a match between the two. And there was little point wondering if the Queen ever thought of her like she often thought about the Queen – Victoria had no idea of her existence. But did the Queen ever think about New Zealand, and her subjects trying to make their fortunes, or at least a competence, in this far away country?

O is for Ovid

You can’t help but think that Ovid held a special place in his parents’ hearts, not just because he was the first-born, but because he was the only child to go on the Great Adventure with them. He alone among the children was born in England, shared their shipboard life and the privations of the early days, even if he probably didn’t remember most of it. It makes it all the more sad for us to know that he would also be the first of their children to die in New Zealand; to judge by the appearance of the name Ovid as the middle name of many of his nephews suggests that he was not only a dear son, but a much-loved brother as well.

O is for Ovid, whose small freckled nose was soon to be put out of joint by the arrival of a brother or sister. Maybe it wouldn’t bother him, no longer being the centre of her attention. He was becoming quite fiercely independent, eager to do things for himself and inclined to become irritated by parental assistance. She didn’t want him running quite as wild as the Maori children from the pa, but if he was happy looking after himself it would be much easier for her when the baby came. She needn’t feel guilty that he was going to be pushed to one side, displaced by the new arrival. Her father had told her many times
how special she was to him, as his first-born child, so she supposed that however many more babies there were, Ovid would always hold a special place in her heart.

The residents of Pipitea Pa were Te Matehou, a hapu (sub-tribe) of Te Ātiawa. They had been part of a group of around 2000 who had migrated south from Taranaki to escape from Waikato raids into their area. They went at first to relatives at Waikanae, encouraged by Te Rauparaha, but by 1836 they had taken over Ngati Mutunga’s pa and cultivation sites when that hapu migrated to the Chatham Islands. By 1840, there were about 150 Te Matehou living at and around Pipitea pa. Although their land was part of the sale of the Wellington area to the New Zealand company, which they later disputed, they were fortunate that the pa site itself was on land which the New Zealand Company held as a reserve for Maori. They were less fortunate with much of their garden and cultivation sites, which were quickly surveyed by the Company as blocks for sale. After a period of resistance, which included the removal of the surveyors’ pegs under cover of darkness, Te Matehou adjusted to the new arrangements and by 1850 were flourishing with the profits of doing business with the settlers. Eventually however, they became disillusioned with the pakeha incomers, and by 1881 most of them had decamped to relatives at Waiwhetu in the Hutt Valley, leaving only nine residents of the pa itself.

One of the biggest challenges for me in writing about the settlers’ relationships with the Maori is to strike a balance – to convey the many and often negative feelings that the pakeha settlers had about their new neighbours without offending modern sensibilities. I lean heavily on writings of the time, including one of William’s own letters, to understand the settlers’ viewpoints; I’m equally indebted to the work of the Maori land claimants and the Waitangi Tribunal for their extensive and detailed research into the history of the Wellington area as part of the current Maori land claims process. My attempt at balance informs Sarah’s thoughts in this next section of her alphabet.

P is for Pa. There were several of them within the town, but the nearest, their neighbour almost, was Pipitea pa. The first time she saw it, on their first day in New Zealand, she had been horrified by its meanness. The low scrubby huts clustered miserably within its tall pickets. The carvings at the gate were ugly and not a little bit frightening with the great poking tongues on the faces. And the people had scared her as well, half-naked, with their painted faces and proud flashing eyes. She had got more used to them now, even knew a few of them, the women who came by selling fish and vegetables, and the young men who passed by on their way to hunt birds in the forest. She couldn’t see herself asking any of them in for tea, and she didn’t want Ovid playing with any of the dirty naked children who swarmed in and out all day long. However, she couldn’t look down on them as some did – how could she when the only real difference between her house and those in the pa was that she could stand upright in hers? She cooked outside in all weathers, just as the Maori women did, although even when it was raining, there were several of them hunkered down talking companionably, while she was usually alone in her misery. The Maori women might be scandalously under-dressed to English eyes, but at least that meant they didn’t have her worries about trying to keep skirts out of both the mud and the fire. She could hardly think herself much better than them, given her situation.

Many of Wellington’s streets are called quays, but all of them except Lambton Quay were originally wharves which were later absorbed by land reclamation into part of the town. Lambton Quay alone was called a quay from the very beginning, although most of the early residents just called it The Beach.

Q is for Quay. They called this rutted track above the beach Lambton Quay. Lambton for the Earl of Durham – it was his family name. But Quay? For all the world as though it was some great dock for shipping. The big ships had to anchor further out in the harbour. There were a couple of little jetties where their boats could pull up, but most passengers and goods were landed directly on the beach. In a spring tide, the water covered the track in places, and even if the sea left it alone, the rain left it muddy and perilous. Quagmire would be a better name than Quay, but presumably Lambton Quagmire would be far less flattering to the Earl. But then, if he ever saw it in all its muddy glory, he would hardly be flattered at all.

Sarah doesn’t tell us exactly when, or why, the family moved to Lambton Quay, although she does indicate that it was before Oscar’s birth on the first of November 1842. Writing for her children around forty years later, she is pretty upfront about the deficiencies of the Thorndon Flat house, and it’s not hard to understand why she would have been pleased to leave it. An improvement in the family’s circumstances, coupled with a desire to be better housed before the arrival of the second child seem logical drivers; however the timing of the Raupo House Ordinance in the same period means it may also have been a factor.

R is for Raupo. She would never have imagined that she would be grateful to be evicted, but the Raupo House Ordinance turned out to be a blessing in disguise. After so many disastrous house fires, fortunately with no loss of life, the Ordinance was a means to rid the town of the Maori-built thatched cottages. Faced with the prospect of a twenty pound tax, their landlord had given them notice to quit so he could pull the house down. She wouldn’t miss it – it was bitterly cold, the southerly wind driving through the gaps in the thatched walls, and the roof leaked constantly, regardless of William’s attempts to patch it. By some miraculous chance, the house on Lambton Quay became available on the same day that the landlord advised them of his plans, and William took the lease before anyone else could get a look in. It was a real house, wooden instead of raupo thatch, and it had proper windows with glass in them, and the cooking fire was in the kitchen with a real chimney and fireplace to keep the whole house warm.

She was so relieved to be there, and to know that she wasn’t going to deliver this baby on a mud floor, that she almost missed William’s musings about using the attached shop-front as an actual shop. She was bracing herself to become the town’s most heavily-pregnant shopkeeper when William came to the conclusion, almost all by himself, that he should stick with plumbing and painting, so he used the shelves in the shop to store his white-lead and turpentine out of Ovid’s reach. She and Ovid used the shop-front’s bay window to take their morning tea (or milk, in Ovid’s case), fascinated by the street and harbour activities in front of them.

Most days, the glass was coated in a sticky layer of sea-salt, removing a lot of detail from their view. This was not always such a bad thing, given some of the goings-on out there. However, it meant that sometimes passersby came and peered in the window to see what the shop might be selling. Ovid would tap on the window and squeal and giggle with delight to see them jump back, surprised to see him there. She should stop him, tell him it was rude to startle people like that, but it amused her and the little boy’s laughter was an addictive pleasure.

L to N

In William and Sarah’s social class, there wasn’t much need for letter-writing, especially within the family. People weren’t particularly mobile – they generally were born, lived and died within the same small area. Emigration meant getting the hang of writing letters, of figuring out what to say and what not to say, all compressed into a small piece of expensive paper.

L is for letters. This business of writing letters was very strange. There was never any need for letters before, with all the family close at hand. Father and Mother must be finding it strange as well – their letters begin formally, as if a school exercise they expect to be judged by a schoolmaster. But sometimes they would write just as they spoke, and it was almost like they were standing in the same room talking. They must find her letters much the same. It was hard to find the words to describe all the new and strange things. And how did you put in a
letter something that you barely mentioned to your own family even when you were face to face? She had puzzled over the words for weeks, finally deciding she would write, “By the time you receive this, our family will number four. The happy event is expected in November.” When she told William, he said that by the time they read it, the event would have taken place, happy or not, but they would still worry until they received confirmation that all was well. So in the end, she hadn’t mentioned it at all.

William wasn’t registered to vote for the 1842 borough elections, and the only thing I can see that would have stopped him was lack of money. The same problem seemed to have affected most of the Gertrude passengers – only 6 of them registered to vote. In fact, from a potential electorate of around 2000, only 352 registered. William was one of only 150 who did register the following year – at a cost of a mere 2/6 – but the election didn’t happen. A clash between national politics and local body politics saw the fledgling municipality founder, and it wasn’t until 1863 that there was an election for a Town Board.

M is for Municipal Corporations Ordinance. The big excitement in the town was the passage of the Municipal Corporations Ordinance and the proclamation of Wellington as a borough. The franchise was 20 shillings, a large sum on William’s income. He was bitterly disappointed that he hadn’t been able to put together this sum in the bare month between the proclamation and the closing of registrations to vote. After all, part of the reason for coming to New Zealand was the hope of a fairer society, although they hadn’t expected that he would get an opportunity to vote quite so quickly. He had buried his disappointment in furious activity, attending all of the town meetings and speaking at many of them. It was an important opportunity, he said, to ensure that the best candidates were chosen to represent the working men. And anyway, getting his name out there and getting to meet almost everyone in the town would undoubtedly lead to opportunities for work. No doubt this was true, but William’s enthusiasms could be exhausting – he would come home from meetings all fired up, words spilling out of him as soon as he came in the door. He positively encouraged her to have opinions of her own, and to debate them with him. Sometimes she thought it was almost a pity that she couldn’t vote herself, but in the end, that was something best left to the men.

I’ve don’t know whether Sarah thought women should have the vote; in the 1840s, perhaps not – for William to be able to vote was new and exciting enough. Maybe later in life she thought, like her daughters did, that women should also have the vote. She died in 1891, before the successful women’s suffrage petition of 1893.

Naturally, N is for Norgrove. I’m not sure where the rest of this came from; it just came out of my fingertips onto the keyboard without any conscious thought. It hadn’t occurred to me until someone pointed it out, but this encapsulates the huge changes Sarah experienced in the space of about two years – new wife, new mother, new country.

N is for Norgrove. She was still getting used to being Mrs Norgrove. It seemed that no-one called her Sarah any more. William called her “dear” and “dearest”. Ovid called her Mama. Sophia, when she was still in Wellington, had called her Sarah, or just as often, she would call her “my dear Mrs Norgrove”, gently mocking the refined tones of the ladies who formed the town’s better society. Only her family still called her Sarah, and now that was just in letters which were few and far between. Sometimes, she just has to say her own name out loud, to hear it, to keep herself from disappearing altogether. Sarah my girl, she says to herself, Sarah, you had better buck up and get on with those potatoes, for they won’t peel themselves.

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.

More of Sarah's alphabet

Here are some more letters from the alphabet exercise I've been working on over the last week or two. Wellington is almost a character in itself in some of these. Sometimes I'm so immersed in Wellington as it was in 1841 and 1842 that I get a nasty shock when I find myself in the present. Then there was the morning on the train, coming round the harbour, when past and present blurred together and Sarah's view and my view were suddenly the same.

B is for bowl. The harbour was like an enormous bowl with water in the bottom of it. The sides of the bowl rose away bush-clad and steep, and the town grasped at whatever land it could at the edge of the water. Sometimes in a roaring southerly, with the sea rising and pushing at the town, it seemed that the bowl would fill with water and cover them all. She knew it couldn’t really happen, but sometimes she imagined them living under water in the bottom of the bowl, the great kahikatea trees as slippery and supple as seaweed, fish swimming down Lambton Quay amongst the carts and horses and women with shopping baskets.

A lot of the letters of the alphabet picked up on Sarah's thoughts and feelings about her second pregnancy - Oscar - in 1842.

C is for confinement. Needlework freed her mind to wander, and it always seemed to wander to her greatest worry, her impending confinement. She was dreading it, not looking forward at all to the inevitable pain, when the baby took over and seemingly began to tear and batter its way out while she fought it for her own life. At the same time she was anxious for it to be over and both of them safe, God willing. Her mother had been the same every time, but at least she had Sarah, had the comfort of knowing that if God took her, Sarah would be there to look after the other children. When Ovid came, having Mother there had been a big comfort, knowing that if it all went wrong, she would take care of the baby. Here in New Zealand, with no family, her fears worried at her. She wanted to be practical, tell William that if she did not survive he should marry again as soon as possible, to provide a mother for Ovid, and the child if it survived her. But she couldn’t bear the thought that she might have to leave her dear William and Ovid, and when the tiny stitches blurred and tears fell into the fine cotton she wasn’t sure whether she was grieving for herself or for them.

D is for daughter. She hoped this baby would be a girl. William wanted another son, but she wanted a daughter this time. Men didn’t seem to value daughters in the same way as women did. Daughters were useful, of course, to help with cooking and housework and the smaller children; but really, a daughter was another chance, someone who could be a better version of herself, prettier, more accomplished perhaps.

Earthquakes were always going to make an appearance - can't live around here without them.

E is for earthquake. That last one had been a real rattler – it seemed to go on for an eternity while the china clattered on the shelves and the table rocked and swayed as she crouched under it, clutching Ovid for dear life. Her heart was still pounding as hard as if she had been running. Would she ever get used to these earthquakes? Did anyone? The Maori children from Pipitea Pa would run out calling “ru, ru”, giggling and laughing like it was something they enjoyed. But how could you enjoy it when the solid and dependable earth beneath your feet suddenly started to ripple and shake so that you couldn’t stand up, and you had no idea how long it would last, or what would come tumbling down?

Apples

I’ve been working on a writing exercise called the Character Alphabet, where you take a letter of the alphabet, let your character pick a word that starts with it, and write a short scene from their point-of-view. I knew straight away that for Sarah, A is for “apple” – which does have a certain clichéd children’s alphabet feel about it, I know. But I’d been thinking about apples. The last of the peaches and nectarines have disappeared from the supermarkets, so this week’s lunchtime fruit for me will be juicy, crunchy, Pacific Rose apples. And I’d been writing about William, Sarah and Ovid visiting the Horticultural Exhibition on Wellington Anniversary Day 1842, where the first apples grown in the region were exhibited.

The apples were grown by the Baron Alzdorf in the Hutt Valley. He put four of them into the exhibition and they received a special prize and a mention in the newspaper reports. They must have been a bit small and confused, those apples, it being January at the time. For new arrivals like the Norgroves, they were probably the first apples they had seen in almost a year, having left England at the height of summer, and arrived in New Zealand at the end of spring. New Zealand’s only indigenous fruits were berries, and there wouldn’t have been many about since William and Sarah arrived – and anyway, how would they have known which ones were safe to eat?

So, knowing I was going to write about Alzdorf’s four apples and Sarah’s reaction to them, I needed to do a little apple research. After all, I don’t want any accidental anachronisms – I don’t mean having her bite into a Pacific Rose, which is a late twentieth-century apple – but if I needed to describe an apple’s colour, texture and taste, it had better be an apple that she might be familiar with. This led to a fantastic voyage around the internet to discover that there are a heck of a lot of varieties of apples out there, with some weird and wonderful names. Ashmead’s Kernel, anyone? Or how about a Flower of Kent or a hefty Peasgood’s Nonsuch? By the time I got to the Cornish Gilliflower, I was drooling into the keyboard, and had to stop for a Pacific Rose of my own.

I wanted to know what sort of apples William and Sarah had been familiar with back in England, which is how I ended up reading Mrs Beeton (loads of apple recipes, but she’s not particular about the varieties to be used) and The Whole Art of Husbandry, written in 1716 by J. Mortimer, a Fellow of the Royal Society, who was rather more helpful, if colourfully descriptive : “The Aromatick or golden-russetting hath no compare, it being of a Gold-colour’d Coat under a Russett Hair, hath some Warts on it, its Flesh of a yellow colour, its form of a flattish round…” Mmmm?

I decided William and Sarah were probably familiar with the Blenheim Orange; the Decio, which dates back to Roman times and looks like the great-grandmother of all apples; the Golden Reinette (or Golden Rennet, according to the spelling of J. Mortimer above); Ashmead’s Kernel; Fearns Pippin; and the White Pearmain, which had been grown in England since about 1200AD. And it was the Pearmain that seemed the most likely candidate for Baron Alzdorf’s first apple trees, being a self-fertilising type, not reliant on other fruits for pollination. At this point, I had to stop myself from diverting down the research path of finding out how the early settlers got their first fruits, vegetables and flowers going without bees for pollination, a topic for future enquiry. Back to the story at hand – here is how “A is for apple” played out.

At the Horticultural Exhibition, Wellington, January 1842

A is for apple.
The next table had only one display, a white china plate holding a pyramid of small green-and-red apples. When had she last seen apples? Certainly not since they had been in New Zealand. In fact, the last time she could remember eating apples was early in her pregnancy with Ovid.

She hadn’t even been sure that she was pregnant; they had only been married a few months, after all. William and Mr Allardice had gone to work on the roof of a house on the outskirts of Ilford. The men were told they could take windfalls from the orchard, and William came home with his lunch-cloth bulging with russety golden rennets. He held them out to show her, and she snatched one up and crunched into it as if it was the only food in the world. Which it was, for her, for the few minutes it took her to gobble it, pips and all. She was licking the juice from her fingers when she saw William’s expression, surprised, but oddly pleased.

“I’m sorry,” she blurted, suddenly conscious of her greed. “I don’t know why…….I just wanted it so badly.”

“Maybe it wasn’t you who wanted it,” he had said, with a meaningful look at her waist that had made her blush deeply, still a little shy with him about the unexpected pleasures of marriage.

He had been right, though. She looked at them both now, as Ovid reached out for the shiny fruit, and William caught him up and held him so that the apples were out of his reach. He looked at her over the top of Ovid’s head, and smiled.

“He still wants apples, then”, William said, winking at her.

Letters from home

On the rare occasions that I write letters, they’re pretty good letters, even if I say so myself. But as my mother, an indefatigable letter-writer herself, will tell you, I’m absolutely no good at sustaining a relationship by letter alone. Years can go by between letters from me, and even the most devoted of friends eventually give up the one-sided effort and fade away. Not even the immediacy of email helps. I might forward the occasional joke, but don’t hang around waiting for a newsy juicy bit of personal correspondence, because it will be a long wait.

I’m lucky to have some of the family letters, although only two written by Sarah, to her adult children. The majority of the letters are from members of the Hall and Norgrove families in England to Sarah and William in New Zealand. I started out thinking that for Sarah, letters would have been a lifeline between her and the family left behind in England. She didn’t have the instant give and take of email; she didn’t even have the dubiously reliable New Zealand postal system which might get a letter from one end of the country to the other in under a week. She had to rely on the dodginess of sailing ships which might not even survive the voyage between England and New Zealand, and if they did, took months on the voyage.

In the early days of Sarah’s life in New Zealand, it would have taken up to a year to receive a reply to a letter she had written – four, five, six months for her letter to reach England, and the same again for the reply to reach her. Letters would have been less a conversation than a series of news bulletins travelling in two directions. This might have served to reinforce Sarah’s sense of isolation and separation from her family – while letters might have kept her connected to family and neighbourhood news, they would also be a reminder of how far away England was.

Paper was not the cheap commodity it is to us these days. Paper for letters was often scarce and always expensive; a newsy letter would be written on both sides of a sheet, and then “crossed” – the paper turned 90 degrees to write across it again. Then the sheet used as the envelope – for there was no such thing as a ready-made envelope – it would be written on as much as possible before being carefully folded around the first sheet and addressed. Postage would have been another expense, although possibly more for the families in England than in New Zealand – the New Zealand Company encouraged immigrants to write positive accounts of their new lives to those at “home”, presumably by giving free postage on their own ships. For the Company, it was free advertising, and many of the letters were collected up and published in their fortnightly English newspaper, The New Zealand Journal.

I was reading an article the other day that seemed almost surprised at the degree of literacy of people of Sarah’s class. I’ve got no way of knowing how and when she learned her letters, but it’s clear that Sarah, her parents and her siblings could all read and write, and that Sarah herself enjoyed reading. “You were very fond of a newspaper when you were at Ilford”, her sister-in-law Hannah wrote, enclosing a selection for Sarah’s amusement. Even though she could read and write, it seems unlikely that Sarah had written many letters before leaving for New Zealand. In England, her family lived nearby and she would have seen them often – no need then for letters to them. People of her class rarely travelled, so she was unlikely to have any friends living at a distance with whom she corresponded. Moving to New Zealand brought many changes, and among them would have been the necessity to maintain relationships with the people left behind through letter-writing.

Sarah’s early letters back to the family in England can only be guessed at. The first letters would probably have been written from the emigration barracks before boarding the ship at Gravesend, and from Gertrude between her departure from Gravesend and her final departure from the Downs eighteen days later. These would have been hasty letters, written when the opportunity of mailing arose, notes about shipboard life and how the family was settling in on board. There may have been one or two opportunities for similar letters during the five months Gertrude was at sea. When another ship was sighted heading in the opposite direction, wherever possible the two ships would drop sail within hailing distance, and news would be exchanged. A boat would be sent between them with mailbags and any other urgently needed provisions. From the first sighting of another ship’s sail, there would have been a few hours, or sometimes only minutes, to compose a quick letter to let the family know that all was well so far.

The first letter Sarah wrote home after landing in New Zealand must have been a difficult one. She wouldn’t have wanted to tell of their disappointment in finding Wellington so primitive, much less than the promised land they had been led to expect. She might not have wanted to confess the poverty of her first home, with its mud floors and leaky roof. She would have wanted to keep her fears about William’s employment prospects to herself, along with her homesickness, and her alienation in a land where not even the birds and trees were familiar. That first letter would have been short, telling how they were safely landed after twenty weeks at sea. It might have told how the town was laid out around the curving bays of the harbour, and of the steep bush-clad hills behind. She might have said it was warm, that the climate seemed promising, and that the nearby bush teemed with bird life which had no natural predators. She might have mentioned the friendships made on the ship, perhaps mentioned other people who had travelled from the same town as the Norgroves. Any mention of their prospects would of necessity have been vague and positive.

What is possibly the reply to that very first letter comes from Sarah’s father, William King Hall. It’s very short, written in the awkward hand of a carpenter for whom expressing himself in a letter is an unfamiliar experience.

Send us word how far you live from the waterline or where you landed and how far Mr Kebble lives from you Mr Allard would be very pleased to have a letter from you He is delighted to hear you are doing well he says William is a clever tradesman and will become a great man he tells every body what he can do

Tell William his mother and sister was well when we heard from them

What a brief and tantalising glimpse of her father this must have been for Sarah. We have to hope that she had received an earlier letter, sent while she was still at sea, which contained some news of her mother, and brothers and sisters, especially her blind younger brother Henry, and Caroline, the sister who was born only months after Ovid. At least there was news of William’s family, and a hint of what was to become another letter-writing relationship, between William’s family in Colchester and Sarah’s family in Ilford.

There’s evidence of correspondence between the two families, forwarding the precious letters and news received from New Zealand. William wrote to his mother, probably in 1846, asking him to find and send a glazier’s vice. His mother forwarded the letter to Sarah’s father, who made enquiries, and on receiving a letter with the price, wrote back to William’s mother Hannah on the bottom of it, asking whether she could find out from someone in the much larger town of Colchester how the vice could be shipped to New Zealand. Hannah in turn must have forwarded the letter to William and Sarah, although any letter of her own that accompanied it has not survived. Even so, the letter would have given Sarah quite a jolt, as William mentions that his wife, Sarah’s mother, is ill and not expected to survive.

A month or two later, the expected black-edged letter arrives from Hall, informing Sarah of her mother’s death, and enclosing a lock of her hair for a keepsake. For the four or five months it took for the letter to reach her, Sarah must have imagined her mother alive; the last month or so, perhaps, after receiving the earlier letter, wondering and worrying. Her father is in turn prosaic - “She was confined to her room for 6 months with a liver complaint. Mr Allison opened her and examined her liver which was her particular wish. He said her liver weighed near 12 pounds”, and anguished – “O Sarrah if you was here I could tell you my trouble but then I think again. Ah Poor Sarrah she has got plenty of trouble for I cannot tell what you go through”. The letter is marked at this point with the stain of one large tear-drop, Sarah’s grief still evident more than 150 years later.

Letters were a mixed blessing then, when the news was bad, and the recipient too far away to be of any help. And a long gap between letters was just as bad, worrying about the reasons for lack of news. In the same letter that tells of her mother’s death, Sarah’s father goes on to say :

My Dear I received your letter in March. Your Poor Mother and I were glad to hear you and William was well likewise the Dear Children. I hope they will never leave you to cause you to think and fret as we have done about you but you seem to think we had forgotten you all together and say you will not rite but I hope you know better than to think so light of a lone Father and Motherless Sisters and Brothers but you are quite just in Finding Fault for I feel guilty and ashamed of neglect in not riteing to you oftener but I hope you will forgive me and as soon as my mind is moore at rest I will rite a long letter. I hope your love to me nor my love to you will never be altered w[h]ile we are in this world.

Poor Sarah. If there was one letter from home she would have wished not to have survived the long voyage to New Zealand, it would have to be this one.