Memories of Te Kiri through my mother’s eyes
Blessed with a very sharp memory, Graeme Duckett’s mother Myrtle shared with him many memories of old Te Kiri and her childhood. Born in Te Kiri, South Taranaki in 1913, this is more of her Coxhead family story.
‘We experienced a cyclone one time. It came down in between our house and the Beers’ place and caught the verandah of Bob and Phyllis Gatenby’s house and the cowshed and left the remains all over his farm.
It came with a roar and then was gone, and then came the heavy rain.
Bob and Phyllis were recently married and were standing by the wood stove about to make a cup of tea, when it happened.
We surmise that they fell out of the hole where the house was pulled away from the stove, and they were left standing among what was left of their furniture.
A very wet, frightened couple arrived at our house to tell the tale.
A bucket in the cowshed was wrapped around a pipe, that no human could have beaten on there. It took them a long time to recover from their experience.
Then came the big flood in the mid 1930s when we lost the bridge.
The poor cows across the river had to be taken down Eltham road to get home to be milked.
One day us kids were surprised to see old Sam Beer coming from the river with a huge eel he’d caught with his pitch fork, the biggest eel we’d ever seen.
It dragged on the ground as he walked along. I don’t know what he did with it – ate it I suppose.
Sometimes during the early milking, we would see people arrive on our grassy flat across the river.
They would put nets across and we found out later they’d been catching hares. I wonder what for?
Mushrooms were plentiful by the kerosene tin full and they tasted different too back then.
We used to pick a basket at a time and run from one mushroom to the another as we spotted them in the paddock.
Mum cooked them in butter, then covered them with milk and thickened them. Oh, they were good.
Bill Hughes told me they’d send kerosene tins full of mushrooms to Auckland.
Potato planting seemed to come around fairly often. Mum sat with a knife cutting the potatoes to be planted.
If they had more than two or more eyes they were cut with an eye in each piece.
Dad was ploughing preparing the ground and as the furrow was turned he threw manure along the row, and our job was to throw a seed potato under the furrow for the next one to cover.
We got tired and kept looking down at the house for lunchtime. Sister Annie was the cook.
When it came time to dig the potatoes up, all of us kids hated that job, probably harder for the digger.
We ate the smallest ones first as the skins were soft, but it was a tedious job and we’d sneak some bigger ones in when Mum wasn’t looking until she cottoned on to what we were doing.
As the potatoes aged in storage another job was taking all the shoots off.
Dad used slag on the paddocks, put on by hand. What a dirty job it was. Slag is black. He had a bag hung in front of his chest to leave both hands free to cast the manure.
Old Harry Hardgreaves used to make us laugh.
He wore his mother’s old dress, and you know the slag never got down his denim jeans like Dad’s did.
Some of you may remember boiled suet puddings which had golden syrup dribbled all over them and it was good. No packets of Shreddo. Mum made her own baking powder from baking soda and cream of tartar (2 of soda and 1 of cream of tartar) and sifted together many times over and sealed in tins.
How I hated feeding the pigs. There was always a leaky kerosene tin we used for the whey or skim ‘‘dack’’ milk.
An old lady, aged 90, reminded me recently of springtime and the ‘‘skittery ‘‘cows on spring grass and of being swiped across the face with a dirty cow’s tail.
Once a cow coughed and sprayed my sister Kathleen’s hair and it ran down her face.
She just stood there and howled.
She had long, very curly hair, so Dad sent her to the house to get it washed.
There were some well-known cows we had that would lash out as we tried to put the leg rope on at milking time.
One of these was a black and white cow called Janine and she’d kick the eye out of a needle. I hated her.
Mum had an Ayrshire called Maggie and would sing to her ‘‘I wandered through the hills today Maggie’’ and Mum would get a lot of milk from her.
If for some reason Mum was not there my eldest brother Bill would milk her.
Bill hated Maggie. She’d dash into the bail, roll her yellow eyes at him and wait to lash at him.
He’d catch her out and give her a kick on the shin and let her know he was the boss that night.
Well, he never did get much milk in the bucket, because she was anxious to get out of the bail and let fly at him as he went.
‘‘Mad Beggar,’’ he’d yell at her and off she’d go like the shot out of a gun.
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