Was William a Chartist?

Was William a Chartist? He went to one Chartist meeting that we know of. This doesn’t necessarily make him one, doesn’t mean he signed any of the petitions or agreed with all of the Charter. He left England before the 3 million signature petition was presented to Parliament, as did many of the Chartists and their supporters. A quick search of the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography shows that quite a few former Chartists ended up in Nelson. Former Chartist leader George Binns, in replying to an attack on him in the Nelson Examiner, said “I have nothing to do with Chartism in New Zealand, and my past enthusiasm might have been forgotten where there is no grievance to redress and no enemy to our weal”. It’s possible that many of the former Chartists in New Zealand felt this way – in the new country, where the English class system had not taken root, and where opportunity was available for all who were willing to put in the work, there were not the same grievances as in England. The former Chartists didn’t need to be activists – they could just get on with their lives. It’s possible that this was the situation William was in.

What adds spice to the mystery is that a few months later, in October 1856, at the public meeting for the election of the Superintendent of Nelson Province, William rushed in to propose Dr David Munro as a candidate. William showed a rather strange haste and lack of propriety – the Nelson Examiner noted that the two main candidates were quietly conferring as to which of them should be proposed first; and Munro already had an intended proposer, who was reduced to seconding the nomination. A third candidate, opposing Munro and his main opponent on a number of issues, was a former Chartist, JP Robinson. So why didn’t William support Robinson? Was it that he didn’t agree with Chartist policies? It seems unlikely, given that life in New Zealand had already provided him with a key aim of the people’s charter, the vote. Was he trying to make a bit of a name for himself in Nelson political circles – he had been there for less than a year, so was he trying to get noticed? Did he have political ambitions of his own? He would have known Munro in Wellington, although they moved in different social circles – did he want to win personal favour with the man?

So does it matter whether he was a Chartist or not? I think, for the purposes of telling this story, that it does. I had been wondering how much of “politics” was going to find its way into the story – the more politics, the more work for me. The context is inevitably political – the New Zealand Company and land issues; Maori and land issues; the Maori wars; and local body politics, which we already know William was involved in. And where does Sarah fit into it all, given that it’s her story? It’s even harder to find out what she would have thought about it all – after all, reported history is so much his-story, and very little her-story. There are a couple of clues which suggest to me that Sarah would have taken an interest in politics, and that she and William may have discussed these issues at home. First, William’s sister comments in a letter to her that she remembers “you were very fond of a newspaper when you were at Ilford” – she encloses some of the local ones for her. Well, apart from advertisements, newspapers of the time were almost entirely political – so we know Sarah took an interest in the world around her. Second, two of her daughters signed the huge electoral petition that ultimately resulted in the 1893 Electoral Act giving New Zealand women the right to vote. Sarah died a couple of years before this; I don’t think the earlier petitions survived, and I don’t know if she signed any of them. But Emma and Kate, the two daughters who never married, did sign – and they had to have been influenced by the views of their parents, with whom they lived far longer than their siblings did. Slender clues perhaps, but I’m coming to the view that political issues were probably regular dinner conversation in the Norgrove household, and that therefore there’s a natural place for it in Sarah’s story.

Going with the flow

People sometimes experience moments where something appears in their creative work that seems to come from beyond them – for writers, a character appears fully-formed from nowhere, or a character says something that you know you didn’t think up yourself. Some people think it’s the hand of God at work. William Blake said, “I myself do nothing. The Holy Spirit accomplishes all through me.” As far as Puccini was concerned, Madame Butterfly was dictated to him by God : “I was merely instrumental in putting it on paper and communicating it to the public”. Sometimes it does feel like that – those are my fingers on the computer keyboard, but it’s just flowing through me from somewhere else altogether. I think flow is an explanation which removes the spiritual element which some people find off-putting –flow is just the state where we’re so in the groove with what we’re doing, everything just comes together. You lose track of time and the world around you and it’s like magic!

Last week I had one of those experiences, resulting in a research side-track and some interesting questions. I’ve been working on writing William and Sarah’s last night on the Gertrude – the immigrants are a bit stunned and disappointed by what they have seen of Wellington. They’re feeling a bit misled by the New Zealand Company’s claims about the place, and there is a lot of talk going on in the steerage compartment instead of the usual quiet getting ready for bed. Here it is, still very much messy First Draft :

Below deck, it was noisy chaos instead of the usual quiet bed-time preparations. The curtains were still open in most of the bunks, and somewhere she could hear a woman weeping. The men were clustered around the tables between the berths, several vigorous discussions taking place at once. A small child’s wail rose above the din, and the sudden tightening of her nipples made her realise that she had been so caught up in her own worries that she had forgotten Ovid. Where was he? They had left him sleeping in their bunk, watched over by the neighbouring Plimmers. She was too small to see the far end of the compartment over her thronging ship-mates. She began to work her way past the benches, struggling past backs and elbows and sea-bags, stubbing her toes as she pushed and excused herself. She glanced up to get her bearings in the shadowy sea of dark coats, and found she could see the pale moon of Ovid’s face peering from their bunk. She reached for him, hands quickly checking over his small body as he wrapped his legs around her waist and pushed his face into her neck. “Mama’s here now,” she murmured to him, “Mama’s here”. Over the hubbub, she heard a gruff voice call out their name from the other side of the table.

“Norgrove! You’ve looked longer on this so-called town of Wellington than the rest of us tonight. What say you about the New Zealand Company’s promises now?”

The muttering voices quieted as benches creaked, men turning to see William as he followed Sarah through the crowd. She heard him sigh, and felt his hand on her shoulder, a brief squeeze that sent warmth and tingling quite unexpectedly through her. She leaned into his solid warmth as he turned to look at the expectant faces.

“Well, certainly it’s not a town or city as we know them back in England,” he began.

“Far from it,” came a voice from near the hatch, as other voices called out, and fists thumped the table.

“Friends,” William shouted. “Friends, that is not why we took this journey! If you wanted the familiar, the towns and cities of England, why then are you here? Why did you bring your wives and children on this dangerous voyage if you wanted a world like the one we left behind?”

“Hear, hear!” came a voice from below and to the right of her. Bodies shifted around Sarah as John Plimmer extracted himself from his family’s bunk and stood up. “Norgrove has the right attitude. This place is full of opportunity for us all!”

Immediately, the uproar broke out again, and William broke away from her to move closer to the table. Men shifted to allow him through and she lost her balance, pushed back against the bunks and almost falling into someone’s bed. A tug at her skirt made her look down, and she saw Eliza Plimmer beckoning her down to join her family in the lower bunk. She squirmed between a ship-mate and her own hanging sea-bag and gratefully sat down on the edge of the bunk as Eliza pulled six-year old Isaac onto her lap to make room. “You stayed on deck a long time.” Eliza leaned over and spoke directly into Sarah’s ear to make herself heard. “Does it look any better for looking at it longer?”

“No,” Sarah said, “not in the slightest.” She tried unsuccessfully to hitch her skirt into a cushion without jolting Ovid, or disturbing Eliza’s two younger children, who were nested in blankets at the back of the bunk. The raised edges of the bunks stopped bedding from sliding out, but made for uncomfortable seats, especially since five months of use had reduced the straw stuffing in the mattresses almost to dust. In the end, she did what Eliza had done, and swung her feet up onto the bunk and leaned her back against the rough boards dividing it from the next bunk. They sat toe to toe, unable to talk without raising their voices, and unable to see anything of what was going on through a solid wall of men’s coats. Sarah let Ovid slide down onto the mattress with his head pillowed on her stomach, and twitched the end of a blanket over him. She thought she saw Eliza rolling her eyes in the gloom as outside, their husbands argued the opportunities and benefits of their wild new Eden against those who despaired.

She stroked Ovid’s fine blond hair – it had lightened in the sun since they had crossed the equator. It really needed cutting, but she wasn’t going near him with a pair of scissors in a ship rolling around at sea. It would have to wait till they got ashore, and then she would barber William as well if she got a chance. Who knew? This time tomorrow night, they would probably be sleeping on the shallow beach she had seen from the deck, or somewhere in a forest under one of those towering trees. She didn’t want to think about it – she wanted to be doing something. No wonder the men were ranting and storming, but none of the women seemed inclined to join in, and she wasn’t going to be the first to speak. Eliza seemed to have come to the same conclusion; she had reached around Isaac for work-basket and was digging through it for something to do. Sarah leaned towards her. “You won’t be able to see to sew in this light.” Eliza pulled out a thick skein of grey wool. “No,” she said, “but we may as well finish rolling the wool while we’re stuck in here.” She picked out the end of the yarn, and held the rest for Sarah to take. Sarah tucked her hands inside the skein and then pulled them apart to hold the loops taut. Eliza started to roll the wool around her fingers, forming a squarish lump that slowly took on the shape of a ball as she wound the wool around it. Sarah’s hands moved automatically, easing the wool off the skein. She focused on it in the dim light as they settled into a rhythm, concentrating on the wool and her hands so that individual words from the men’s discussion blurred into a loud hum.

They were just starting on the second skein when Eliza abruptly stopped winding and leaned out of the bunk to look at something. Although the men nearest them were still talking hard, the noise seemed to be dying down, and Sarah thought it was probably the ship’s surgeon, come on his nightly rounds. She was proved right when Dr Garrett’s voice called out above the noise. “What’s this then, a Chartist meeting?” The silence that followed was so sudden and tense that she realised a good number of her fellow passengers must have been more involved in the Chartist actions than merely signing a petition.

© Helen McNaught

I stopped writing in complete surprise when Dr Garrett spoke, because where in the world did “a Chartist meeting” come from?? It’s not something I ever studied in a formal history class, but I knew I had run across it somewhere. Eventually, I tracked it back to the Nelson Examiner’s report on a public meeting held in 1856 to discuss the Education Act. In speaking in favour of the Act, our William “remembered attending a Chartist meeting about 25 years ago, at which one of the great reasons urged for the passing of the people’s charter was that the Government did not make proper provision for the education of the people”.

The rest of his speech is quite fascinating, but I’ll come back to it at another time. I took off into an exploration of Chartism, starting with Wikipedia, and ending up in some fairly scholarly articles. I haven’t quite finished yet – am still wondering if anyone has written a thesis on the links between Chartism and emigration to New Zealand – because obviously there has to be a link.

Just as interesting, though, is whether great-great grandpa was a Chartist, and does it matter anyway? I’ll come back to this in my next blog entry, because this one is already enormous!

A Holiday

It's Waitangi Day - our national holiday - celebrated by me by taking a day to spend on myself, with William and Sarah. Not that it would have meant anything to them - the anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi wasn't marked until 1934, and didn't become a public holiday until 1974. I've been thinking about Wellington Anniversary Day, which is now celebrated with a public holiday in the Wellington Province. I didn't make anything special of it this year, because it was actually the last day of my month-long summer vacation - I was thinking about work and getting ready to go back to the office. But then, how many of the thousands who celebrated with the traditional trip to the beach/river/lake and a barbecue were thinking about the original Wellington Anniversary Day?

The day was first celebrated in 1841, to mark the anniversary of the arrival of the Aurora, the first of the New Zealand Company settler ships to arrive in Wellington. The following year, William and Sarah would have been barely three months in Wellington when the second anniversary day rolled around. It wasn't a public holiday as we know them today, although it was celebrated on the nearest Monday, rather than the actual day, just as we do now.

There was a varied sports programme for the day, starting with a sailing match (boats with under 30 foot keel) and a rowing match between whaleboats in the morning. There was horse-racing over hurdles. For those with only themselvs to enter competition, there were sack-jumping races, the traditional catch-a-greasy-pig and climb-a-greasy-pole events, a one mile running race and a rifle-shooting match. In the evening, Maori from the Wellington side of the harbour staged a canoe race against those from the Petone side, won by the Petone men. The same day, the Wellington Horicultural and Botanical Society held its first exhibition, which saw fruit and vegetables of surpising quality and size exhibited. At 9pm, a ball was held - ticket price 10/6 for the men, who were free to bring as many ladies as they could persuade to join them.

How did William, Sarah and Ovid spend Wellington Anniversary Day 1842? I have absolutely no idea! At this stage I think it's unlikely that William would have had his own business up and running. I think he would probably have been taking work wherever he could get it, as a contractor and a labourer. There seems to have been plenty of labouring work around, clearing land and building roads. If he had the day off on Anniversary Day, it wouldn't have been a paid holiday, but it seems like everyone who could took the day to celebrate. I imagine that Sarah packed up a picnic of some kind (succeeding generations of Norgroves have been indefatigable picnickers) and they headed out into the sunny morning to watch the races from the beach. I think they would have gone along to the Horticultural Exhibition to check out the vegetables - they might have got a vegie garden of their own started by now, and would be keen to see what sort of specimens other people were producing. They could have walked along to Te Aro to take Ovid to watch the horse racing, and then back along the harbour to see the waka race. I see William networking with everyone he knew, and even those he didn't, his mind churning with ideas and possibilities. Perhaps he would have taken his sketch pad, and in quieter moments sketched the scenes in front of him - the sails in the distance, the whale boat, the Maori and their waka, the crowds gathered in the sun - trying to catch something of the simple enjoyment people were taking in their holiday fete. Sarah would have been catching up with friends from the Gertrude, the women comparing notes on how they were settling in, and how their children were coming along. Ovid would have been bounding around, wanting to look at everything, touch things, taste them - a source of constant concern to his mother in case he fell in the water or got trampled underfoot. The only time Sarah would have stopped glancing around anxiously to check on him would have been when he was safely on his father's shoulders, watching a race or catching a ride as they walked along.

By the time the waka race finished early in the evening, the light would have been fading, and the family would have been tired from all the walking and talking, and probably a little sunburned into the bargain. As they wouldn't have been going to the ball (not having 10/6 to spare, and not really being of the ball-going class) they might have just gone quietly home for supper and an early night. Or perhaps they joined friends for a private party at someone's house, taking food and sitting around talking, maybe dancing a few country dances to the sound of a fiddle. And at the very end of the day, before going to sleep, perhaps William and Sarah lay snuggled up in bed and reflected on the day, the different sights and sounds, the strange juxtaposition of the traditional English rural games against the unfamiliar Maori in their canoes. They would have been reminded of how far they were from their old home and the families they had left behind. Wellington, so alien at first, they realised had become home; after such a short time, it seemed like they had been here forever.

Cats and other household vermin

I was thinking the other night about William and Sarah’s cat. Well, I assume there was more than one, over the years. The only mention of a pet I have seen in family letters is in one from William’s sister Hannah, in which she says, “Mother says she fancies she can see dear Gertrude sitting on a footstool by the fire nursing the cat”. I’ve got to imagine there were family cats – there wouldn’t have been any shortage of available kittens, given the lack of feline birth control technology. Cats were the original mouse-traps, after all, and there is no more effective mouse-trap than an under-fed cat.

Thinking about Gertrude’s cat made me wonder about where it came from. Cats aren’t native to New Zealand – in fact, our bird life had no natural predators until people and a variety of ship stow-aways arrived in the country. So I guess cats in New Zealand are descended from cats that jumped ship here; and those cats probably originated around the docks of London and other English ports. As well as contemplating my family history, I realise that my own Avro’s murky genealogy undoubtedly goes back to some immigrant cat as well – most likely a steerage cat or deserter cat from a ship’s crew, rather than a first-class cabin cat! Possibly he is even a descendant of Gertrude’s cat, although given that he doesn’t even know who his own parents were, it’s not something we’ll ever be able to find out!

Avro is known to the neighbourhood as The Terminator, because any small creature unfortunate enough to cross his path is likely to be terminated with extreme prejudice. I don't mind him killing mice and rats - that's his job – but I do object to the carnage amongst the local birdlife, and I get very tired of my house being the killing ground. I've lost count of the number of dead birds and bird parts I've had to clean up. The toilet seems to be his favourite place to take things to kill, which makes for a pleasant start to the day when I stagger in there semi-conscious and find the remains of Avro's "first breakfast". On one memorable occasion, there was not only the dead bird, but also the remains of the branch it had been sitting on when captured, which must have been a challenge for him to get through the cat door. Then there are the escapees - more than once I've come into the lounge to find a ruffled and aggrieved bird perched on top of a bookshelf, and evidence of a vigorous pursuit by the cat.

As for the rats and mice - well, my neighbour Anne reports that she has had no more mice problems since The Terminator commenced operations down the side of her house. (Here he is, hunkered down under Anne’s bathroom window, waiting for lunch to walk past.) Unfortunately, Avro has merely transferred her mouse problem to me, because he will bring the dratted things indoors to play with. Half the time he loses them under bits of furniture - then he loses interest and goes outside to look for something else to play with. The surviving mice make themselves very comfortable in my kitchen. Those that don't survive turn up whenever I move furniture...

It's not always mice, either - I don't want to think about where he is finding them, but Avro has also brought in a few rats. The other night I got up to go to the loo, and in the dark stood on something soft - which turned out to be Avro himself, who hissed wildly and clawed his way up my leg in fury. When I turned on the lights to survey the damage, I found Avro poking around under a pile of towels which were waiting to be washed. By the time I had cleaned and bandaged my many lacerations, Avro had wandered out of the room, so I lifted one of the towels, and out popped.....some kind of rodent - either an extremely obese mouse, or a small rat. (I would prefer to think it was the former). Fortunately Avro came back and took it outside to kill. This morning I found a fresh dead rat in the middle of the back lawn. It wasn’t there last night, and since Avro spent most of the night on my bed, he must have caught it early this morning. I am very, very glad he didn’t feel the need to bring it into the bedroom to tell me all about it!

Then there are the skinks, which I think are probably on the national endangered species list - they are certainly endangered around here. Sometimes I manage to rescue them - occasionally I am fooled by the skink survival mechanism of dropping their tail, and rescue the wrong part. One time I encountered Avro acting suspiciously in the loo, but I couldn't see evidence of anything being hunted so I thought no more about it. The next day I picked up the spare pack of toilet rolls, and found a large and tail-less skink had been hiding underneath. It took off into the laundry, where there are several holes in the floor, so hopefully it has found a safe haven underneath the house, at least until it grows a new tail. Yesterday morning I heard Avro crashing around under the dining table, and found him in hot pursuit of another tail-less skink. I shut the cat in the bathroom until the skink had time to escape – Avro was furious and stormed around like a rock star trashing a hotel room, but at least the little lizard got away.

It could be worse, I suppose. At least I don’t feel the need to eat whatever Avro kills. Adela Stewart, an early settler to New Zealand, got so bored with her diet of mutton, mutton and more mutton (she lived in a sheep farming district) that she traded a bit of mutton for a quail that her cat brought in. She plucked the quail, cooked it, and ate it with great pleasure. Thereafter the cat, and its offspring, regularly hunted quail for her and brought them in to swap for meat. I can’t see myself coming to quite the same arrangement with Avro!

The mystery of the vanishing barque

I've never been able to find out what happened to the good ship Gertrude, which brought the family to New Zealand. It doesn't really matter - it's not germane to the story - I was only looking to find more documentation about the ship. I had assumed that like many of the migrant ships, Gertrude would have made more than one voyage to New Zealand. And if she did, I could imagine that William and Sarah would have taken the children down to the harbour to show them the ship that Mother and Father and Ovid came to New Zealand on. So I checked for later voyages, and found none. There was another Gertrude, a much smaller brig, that made a couple of migrant voyages later in the century, but the barque Gertrude never returned. I wondered if she had gone on to do migrant voyages to America, Canada or Australia, or had even been wrecked, but despite the plethora of websites - and the multitude of fishing boats and steamers called Gertrude - I can't find her. I'm curious. I'd like to know, but it's a side-track.

What's more annoying is the mystery of the disappearing ship's papers. The passenger lists of the New Zealand Company migrant ships, and in fact the passenger lists of all the later migrant ships carrying assisted immigrants, survived because they were essentially accounting records. Other records of the New Zealand Company ships, such as the captain's and surgeon's diaries, and the plans of the steerage accommodation, survived because they were part of the official record - they might have been required, for example, if there were complaints about a particular voyage. These papers are held by Archives New Zealand.

When I was a very new assistant archivist at National Archives, as it was then, I was very excited to discover this. As soon as I had a chance, I pounced on the box of records for Gertrude - in those days, the papers for each ship were in distinctive, individual green boxes, although I think they were probably re-boxed when we moved to the Mulgrave Street building. I was gob-smacked to discover that all of the really good stuff - the diaries and the ship's plan - were missing. They had been there, but at some point when security was rather slacker than it is today, someone had taken them. It's hard to believe that someone could be so unbelievably selfish as to think, my ancestors came on this ship, so it's my right to have these. There were 175 people on that ship - the descendants probably number in the hundreds of thousands by now! The whole point of archives and manuscript repositories is that everyone can share and have access to historic documents. Aaaargh! Twenty years later, it still makes me furious!

I never planned to write the story of William and Sarah's five-month journey to New Zealand on Gertrude. From the time I first planned to write Sarah's story, I knew these critical papers were missing. Subsequent research has shown that if any of the passengers were keen diarists, their observations on the voyage either haven't survived or are still in private hands. All Sarah left us were some poems containing recollections - nothing of the voyage - but at least a little about their arrival in New Zealand. So that's where my story starts.

The Gertrude arrived in Port Nicholson on the 31st of October 1841, but the passengers were not landed until the second of November - this would have been because of medical inspections as well as the sheer logistical nightmare of unloading an anchored ship via small boats - there were no quays for the big ships in the 1840s. For those two days spent on the ship anchored in the harbour, I do need to know a little more. The immigrants were shocked and surprised on discovering that Wellington was not what they expected, that it was nothing like the towns and countryside of England, and it was far less developed than they had been led to believe. Those last few days on Gertrude were the last link to their old life, and the end of the ordered shipboard life they had experienced for nearly five months. For me, this is where Sarah's story really begins. As soon as immigrants set foot on the shore of this strange new country, they were on their own, and they were left to make their new lives out of very raw materials.

Back on a bike

It's been a tiring week, the first week back at work, and it was only four days instead of the usual five. It's the getting up early that does it - I've been falling asleep on the train in the morning; the first day back I fell asleep going home, which I never do. I also fell asleep on the floor under my desk at work (I do my reading on the floor - it's more comfortable than a chair). I was just resting my chin on my hands. I was just resting my eyes....next thing I knew, a small, distant voice was asking, "Helen, are you awake?" I couldn't exactly hide that I'd been asleep, because when my eyes creaked open I couldn't focus, and it must have been pretty obvious that although the lights were on, no-one was home. Now my team think it's a great joke to put their heads around the corner of my bookcase and ask if I'm awake!

I didn't ride my bike seriously last week because all my energy was going into working on the house. I made a few quick trips down to the shops and the public library, but that was it. I didn't bike this week because I was so tired that I just wanted to go to bed when I got home. The one night that I planned to go out on my bike, Tranz Metro stuffed us around and we were an hour late home. Most of the hour waiting for the late train to arrive was spent in the pub at the railway station, which was completely the opposite of my fitness-enhancing plans for the evening. So it's been a bike-free couple of weeks, while the emails from ActiveSmart kept arriving with reminders of my current training plan, making me painfully aware that I was getting seriously behind.

Yesterday, in the course of catching up with the variety of environmentally-friendly, carbon neutral and sustainability issues that are part of my job, I realised that Bike Week is bearing down on us like a runaway train. Last year it was a mad scramble to Bike Week. I was a non-cyclist then, but publicised the event to the cyclists at work, who embraced it with enthusiasm, formed a BUG (Bicycle User Group) and got things happening for Bike To Work Day. My contribution was to upgrade the facilities for cyclists in some of our buildings, and generally make encouraging noises to all those participating. At some point during the post-Bike Week celebrations (our organisation won a prize or two), our Chief Executive and I shook hands on a "next year, I'll do it if you do it" kind of arrangement. Hence my purchase of a second-hand road bike at the beginning of summer, and my rather unexpected falling in love with recreational cycling after 30 years of not riding a bike.

So - I've registered the organisation for the Bike Wise Business battle, and put my name down as an entrant. Bike To Work Day won't be a happening thing for me - I'm not quite up to a 90-odd kilometre trip that includes a mountain range and a major state highway! The Bike Wise Business battle, however, runs for just over a week, and all kilometres on the bike get counted for each entrant's total. So I need to start gearing up to do as much mileage as I can during that period. I don't have a chance of winning the individual prize - last year it was some nut-case who can't have spent much time at work because he was so busy clocking up about 700km - but if I can add 50 or 70kms to my organisation's total, it will help our overall score. And more to the point, Bike Wise Week is about encouraging people to choose cycling - as a way of getting to work or school, as a way of getting around town, for fitness and leisure - and it seems to have succeeded with me.

This morning I got woken up early, so I went out and rode for half an hour out into the countryside. I could feel the difference that two weeks of not cycling had made - it felt like hard going in places that are usually a cruise. The first hill felt like Mt Everest, and now that I'm back home, my legs and butt are definitely feeling it! But it was great to be riding again. I taught myself to ride a bike when I was 7 or 8 - it was Mum's bike, so it was far too big for me, but great was my triumph when I made that first wobbly circuit of the house! We used to cycle to school back in those care-free days when it was safe enough for kids to do that kind of thing. My bike was my only form of transport when I was in high school. So it's funny, but when I'm out riding now, some of that childish joy about being able to ride around by myself comes back. Especially going down hill - the 8-year old part of me is thinking, wheeeeeeeeeeee, while the adult part of me is worrying about how long I'm going to spend in hospital if I fall off! So far, I've managed to stay on, but the road bike's size and skinny tires make me feel way more unstable than my old Raleigh-20 clone. I've been looking longingly at the mountain bikes with their fatter tires on my new favourite website, Torpedo7. A mountain bike would also mean my cycling routes would become more interesting, as I wouldn't have to turn back when the roads change from tarseal to gravel like I do now - out here in the boonies, the tarseal doesn't extend very far into the countryside. But until I can afford a new toy, I'll just keep pedalling on the old one and just enjoy being back on a bike.

Back to work

It is very early in the morning - just after 5am. After a month on holiday, I've forgotten how to get up before dawn, before the birds even. It's back to work today, and I have that back to school feeling. I've made great progress on the house painting, in large part thanks to Mum and Dad, who have been helping out with gardening, painting and household repairs so that I can spend the afternoons in 1841. Anyway, I still have to finish the final top-coat of paint, and do the window trims, but one side of the house looks vastly improved - so much so that I kind of want to keep going and finish the whole lot. If the weather stays like this for the next few weekends, I will see how much I can get done.

Yesterday was incredibly hot and humid. It was a relief to be indoors with the fan going - which some of the time was a gentle November breeze blowing on William and Sarah as they stood on the deck of the Gertrude and surveyed their new home. I can till taste the salt-laden air. This morning I'll be back there - a literal commute to Wellington, rather than 1841, although I see the city in layers - as it is now, as it has been over the almost 30 years that I've lived and worked there, as it was during the early days when William and Sarah were there. I walk past them in the street sometimes - every night when I walk to the railway station (which is on reclaimed land, in an area that was water in 1841), I walk right past the place where they lived, past the Thistle Inn where William might have had a beer after work, and I think about them.

But for now, breakfast and 2008 await!

Burns, bites and bruises

Painting the house has turned out to have some unexpected hazards. Not sunburn - after a childhood of pinkness, burns and blistering, I am very careful about avoiding the sun, and plastering myself in sunscreen when exposure is unavoidable. So I'm not sunburnt. I am bitten though - yesterday, I got attacked by a combined squadron of mosquitoes and sandflies when I was up a ladder, one hand holding onto the house and the sander in the other, unable to swat or even jump out of the way. Later in the day, I accidentally knocked over one of the painting trestles and it landed heavily across my right forearm. A potentially spectacular bruise is forming, although at the moment it's just a darkish smear that looks as though I haven't washed for a while.

So I set out on this morning's painting effort well-anointed - first with arnica, on the bruise; then copious amounts of sunblock, and finally some spray-on insect repellent that comes with so many warnings on the can that I can't believe it's actually safe to use. I made it to the end of the day without further injury, although it took some considerable effort to wash all of the above, and a fair bit of spattered undercoat, off myself when I had finished. It certainly gave me plenty of time to consider how great-great-grandma would have coped with such things.

For a start, I guess she wouldn't have had to worry too much about sunburn, because year-round, she was probably swathed head to toe in voluminous garments and multiple layers of underwear. Add a hat and gloves, and the sun wouldn't have got a look in. Neither would the mosquitoes and sandflies - they would have had great difficulty in finding skin. (But great-great-grandpa seems to have managed all right, judging by all those babies.) Heat-stroke would have been more of a risk for Sarah than sunburn. But if she or the kids did get sunburnt, the remedy was probably the same as when I was younger - vinegar, dabbed ever-so-gently onto the burns. It took the sting out, even if it did make you smell like salad dressing. To repel insects, if she had some essential oils like citronella, she could have mixed them with oil to rub on the skin. I found a recipe for an old herbal repellent made by simmering half a cup of feverfew blossoms in a cup of oil for 20 minutes, cooling and then adding vast quantities of chopped garlic. The resulting brew had to be sealed in a jar and spend two weeks on a sunny windowsill before use, so it was obviously something that required forward planning. I suppose if the feverfew wasn't in blossom, that just left garlic - some by mouth, to make your blood unappealing to the bugs, and the rest smeared on the skin - guaranteed to repel insects, along with friends, family and vampires. If the bugs did break through the defences, then rubbing the bite with garlic helped. So did lemon juice. (This is starting to sound like a recipe for salad dressing.)

As for the bruise, arnica is a pretty old-fashioned remedy, and Sarah probably had some in her medicine chest. If not, a liniment made with eucalyptus, camphor and wintergreen oils would probably have been available, as would witch hazel. A family health manual of the 1830s suggests wormwood, the dried leaves moistened with a little vinegar. I think that stuff might be illegal now! The local remedies, which Maori would have used and possibly shared with the early settlers, included boiled kahikatea leaves bandaged to the bruised area, or boiled tutu shoots in a poultice. First find your tutu; this might be easier than obtaining kahikatea leaves, which tend to be at the top of very, very tall kahikatea trees and you would be risking more than bruises to get them. Ice is also good for bruises, not that there would have been much available to great-great-grandma in the summer of 1841. Ice is, however, available to me, although at this stage I feel it is going to be a lot more effective bobbing around in a large glass of rum and coke............

Portraits

For the last couple of days, after the sun and heat have driven me indoors from sanding and scraping at old paintwork, I've been trying to get to know Sarah a little bit better. I started with photographs. Unfortunately, there are only 3 photos of her in existence, all of them taken later in life.

This one I've dated to 1864, so she would have been around 46 years old. Immediately I see that we have two things in common : (1) neither of us photographs well; and (2) we both have a tendency to portliness. Interestingly, the hair style dates from the early 1840s, so is probably how she wore her hair as a young woman. Back in the nineteenth century, people tended to get all dressed up in their Sunday best to have their "portraits" taken, so the hairstyle may have been Sundays-only. Although her hair looks as though it might be wavy, those corkscrewing ringlets would have meant going to bed with her hair twisted up in rags, and you wouldn't be wanting to do that every night of the week!

I've got no idea what Sarah looked like as a young woman. The best I can come up with are photos of one of her sisters, and one of her daughters, as likely guides to how she may have looked.

This is Caroline Hall, Sarah's youngest sister. The last time Sarah saw her sister in person, Caroline would have been a six-month old baby - Sarah's mother had Caroline six months after Sarah gave birth to her first child. Cal (as her father called her) and Sarah knew each only through letters and the occasional photograph.

And this is Kate Norgrove, the youngest of Sarah's daughters to survive childhood, and the one I think looks most like her. She is probably about 15 here, and obviously went to a lot trouble for her portrait - curling her hair in ringlets and finishing it off with a flower.

Painting and time travel

Yesterday I became slightly side-tracked from the research by needing to get started on my other summer holiday project - painting my house. Painting one side of it anyway - the master-plan being to paint one side every summer. I meant to start last summer, but procrastinated my way into winter. The weather over the intervening months has removed a large quantity of old paint for me, so being down to bare boards in a number of places, I really have to get on with it.

I spent yesterday morning and this morning, while that side of the house was in shade, water-blasting and scraping. And of course, most of the time I was thinking about what great-great-grandad William, the professional house-painter, would have thought if I could have zapped him through time to lend a hand. Once he had got over the shock of time travel, not to mention the sight of a woman in t-shirt and shorts, he would probably have agreed with me that the previous owners of this house did an appalling job last time they painted it (and possibly the time before that as well). I have to assume it was the owners - I hope nobody got paid to do a job this bad! Anyway, I think William would like the power tools. I am sure he would love the water-blaster, because I sure do - in fact, I might have to fight him for a turn with it. I just love blasting away and seeing great chunks of really bad paint come flying off. Scraping and sanding is not quite so much fun, but there is clear evidence of progress being made. At least it now looks like a work in progress, rather than the neglected dwelling of a slothful home-owner.

It's funny how I have more of a sense of William as a person than I do of Sarah. Maybe it's because I've spent most of the last week chasing him through old newspapers. Maybe it's because I'm more like him than I am like Sarah - not in the sense of looks or characteristics (I'm very much my father's daughter!) but in how I think, and what I do. I have absolutely no idea what it would be like to be a married mother of ten with no life outside the home. I have very little idea of what Sarah's views on her life and her world were. If I zapped her through time, instead of William, how would she react? What would interest her about life in 2008? It might be a good idea to exercise my mind with that next time I get back up the ladder to scrape and sand.

Plumbing part II

My musings on plumbing provoked some parental memories. There was, of course, the incident where the long drop on the farm got blown up by someone disposing of an illicit cigarette down it in an attempt to avoid being caught smoking (I'm sure an almighty bang and a shower of dunny parts was easier to explain.....)

And then there was the nightman - the night-soil man, the night-cart man. How could I have forgotten that? Mum says that when she was young, the Dillon St house (that's the one in the painting) still had an out-house, as did Tomo Mai, the house where she grew up. The night-man came around on Saturday nights and emptied the can. That's a job to add to my I'm Having A Crappy Day But At Least I'm Not A....... list, along with the modern equivalent, being the person who empties the sanitary bins in the office toilets.

So more questions - when did the night-cart service start in Wellington? Who was the nightman? Was it a family business? It's not something I've seen in the newspaper advertisements, but then, I don't suppose it was something people wanted to be very public about. You don't see recruitment ads for sturdy young lads willing to work by night, either...

Washing the dishes

A couple of months back, the dishwasher completed its last cycle in a cloud of smoke, with a tremendous bang that blew all the electrical circuits in the house. Since then I have been washing the dishes by hand, the old-fashioned way. I hate housework of any kind, but usually when I'm doing it, I can distract myself by thinking about how Sarah would have done her housework (and how much she would have appreciated modern labour-saving devices - I especially think this when I'm up to my elbows in hot soapy water and really missing the dishwasher!)

Oddly enough, although some of the books I have about our pioneer women go into extensive detail about washing clothes - a process that seems to have taken up three days of every week - they are strangely silent about washing dishes. Is the assumption that the process isn't that much different to hand-washing dishes today? There are some differences - I have a plumbed sink with a drain, which Sarah wouldn't have had in the early days. My hot water comes from the tap - I don't have to boil great pots of it on the stove. My soap suds come courtesy of a bottle of environmentally-friendly dishwashing liquid - not sure what Sarah would have used. Washing soda? Home-made bar soap, like the Sunlight bars my Mum still uses for the dishes? No fancy pot scrubbers for Sarah, either, or a plastic dish-brush, or rubber gloves.

But many things are still the same :

• the way the steam from the hot water sets off your sinuses and you end up sniffing because your hands are wet and you can't blow your nose;
• the way you look out the kitchen window and notice things - like the roses need dead-heading and there's a tui perched on the flax eating seeds;
• the way you always get interrupted - me : the phone rings, the cat comes in with a bird that it wants to disembowel under the dining table; Sarah - kids crying or fighting, someone comes to the door, husband wants to know where his socks are
• the way you think about the dishes while you're scrubbing away at them - Mum gave me these plates; those old silver forks came from my grandmother; that chip in a favourite bowl happened when the kids were scuffling over a wish-bone;
• the way you think about the meal you cooked and put on the plates - what you could have done differently; what you might try next time to please a fussy eater or use up something that's getting close to its best-by date...

I still think Sarah would have wanted a dishwasher......