DISTANT MEMORIES

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 103, 25 January 1935, Page 10

DISTANT MEMORIES

A Near Centenarian Who Likes to Recite LIVED IN NEW ZEALAND 86 YEARS When aged pioneers of New Zealand gathered at the meeting of the Early Settlers’ Association in Wellington this week there was one who perforce sat in her armchair at home and bitterly lamented that she was unable to be -. there. She is Mrs. W. Brooks, 86 years ago a mud hut resident of Lyttelton, 68 years ago for the first time in the Wairarapa. and a fairly recent arrival in Wellington. In March will be her ninety-sixth birthday. "I was feeling poorly at the time, so I couldn’t go to the meeting.” Mrs. Brooks said to a “Dominion” reporter when he visited her yesterday. She did so want to be there, she added. However. she was feeling well now. As she tried to throw her mind back over the greater part of a century to tlie days when New Zealand was, from the colonising point of view, really new, it was revealed that had she been at the meeting she could have claimed herself one of its most prominent guests. Mrs. Brooks came to New Zealand at the age of ten with her parents, named Pavis, in the Isabella Herkus, in 1849. They landed at Lyttelton, where, she says, there was only one building, the land office; Christchurch was a swamp, and there were no farms on the Canterbury Plains. The ship’s passengers had no dwellings to move into, so they lived in tents made of their own blankets and sheets until they were able to help build for one another huts—-made in the most primitive rural fashion of their homeland with mud and glass thatch. . _ .. .. „ While Mrs. Brooks was in Lyttelton the first storekeeper arrived; he was a Mr. Pratt, who came from Nelson and set up his business in London Street. Before that the settlers bought much of their food from the Maoris, and for the rest mainly depended on their hurriedly cultivated gardens. She remembers the whalers calling at the port, and also the arrival of the French warship that, a little later, was narrowly forestalled at Akaroa in planting the national flag. With her eyes sparkling Mrs. Brooks recalled the first ball held at Lyttelton. “It was very fashionable; it was attended by the highest to the lowest in the district,” she Said. ' Then there was the time when the first sod of the railway was turned near Lyttelton, accompanied by a “grand feed” for the whole of the settlers. Among Mrs. Brooks’s memories of early Lyttelton are “Bobby” Rhodes, father of Sir Heaton Rhodes; and also Dr. Donald “a saintly man,” she said. “He must have had 'money of his own, because he did everything he could to help us all-” . , In about 1860 Mrs. Brooks—married to a man who died some time agomoved to the Hutt, and very shortly after that to Greytown. Those were times when life for her was comparatively well-ordered; that is, she no longer had to perform such tasks as cook dinner in a tin over a crudely built fireplace, and then use the same tin to wash the clothes in. Mrs. Brooks bore eleven children, six of whom are still living. “The settlers used to have to turn to anything before they got their farms or businesses going,” she said. “They were not too good to work for themselves as labourers, whatever their birth. But we used to have our good times.” A bright smile came over her face. “I still recite. Would you like to hear me?” she inquired, and the old lady of 96 recited about twenty verses of a ballad that sounded like something from the pages of a midVictorian family magazine. “They used to invite me to recite that at all the old goings-on,” she said. “And I used to tell a funny story, too. You should have heard them clapping and stamping their feet, it used to take on so. I will tell it to you. . . .”