A PIONEER LOOKS BACK

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 82, 17 January 1941, Page 42

A PIONEER LOOKS BACK

across the tea-table nodded her head with a faint kind of wonder. I use the term elderly because she has attained the dignity of seventy-three years. But there the justification ends. Her keen intelligence, her dauntless spirit, the tall, erect figure and scarcely greying hair belie her burden of years. I saw that puzzled wonder still in her eyes. "Life to-day," she said, "it is so vastly different from when I was a girl. I hear people complaining of their lot-and I think back on my own girlhood with its privations and its loneliness-its complete lack of leisure and amusement. My life was typical of the working class that helped to build up New Zealand." In 1854 Alice’s father arrived at Lyttelton on the sailing ship "Caroline Agnes." By trade he was a gardener, but he was to set his hand to many another plough; not the least of his achievements being the production of a family of 13. Many of this large family are now dead. Alice, who is 73, sat facing me now across the tea-table. Her mother, she told me, had lived for 99142 years. At 96, she gave a talk and a recitation over the air. She had lived her life fully. Alice’s early memories were centred round the wilderness of Upper Hutt, where the family first went to live on its arrival in New Zealand. When she was nine years of age, they crossed the Rimutakas and joined the first settlers in Greytown. elderly woman facing me Towering Trees "My abiding memory of Greytown," she said, "was the towering trees, kauri and totara, that seemed to brush the sky. I often used to look up and see fairies dancing among the branches. Ours was a hard, frugal life. Money, as I remember it, was non-existent. We lived on what we could wrest from the soil, and by exchange in food with our good neighbours. Our meals consisted of camp bread, boiled bacon with water cress and rariki, One of our luxuries was a pie made from the little brown curly fronds you find in the centre of tree-ferns. Cooked with cloves and sugar, they tasted just like apples."

When Alice had attained her ninth birthday, she took her first position as nurserymaid at the local clergyman’s house. While there, she used to pray passionately that some opportunity would present itself of getting some schooling and studying music. The last dream she never realised, but when she was 11 years old, she took another position as nurserymaid to a school teacher’s child. In return she received 2/6 a week and some rude kind of schooling in her brief leisure hours. Her salary she never saw, as it was paid to her parents,

No Dress Problem "Was dress a problem in those days?" I asked. "Well, not really," she said. "We only had the choice of two materials-winsey and linsey-wolsey. We wore large sunbonnets and stockings with red rings like a peppermint stick." When she was 12, Alice moved on to Marlborough where she became nursemaid at a station home. Here her salary was 7/- a week. The other girls told her of the splendid opportunities offering in Wellington, and when she had £3 saved, she set out to try her fortunes there. She arrived at Wellington Station with only 6/- left in her purse. She drew a picture for me of that early

Wellington: The sea-front lapped up against Manners Street, which was the popular promenade for the crowds on Saturday night. Bullock teams drove leisurely down Willis Street. The carriages of the well-to-do picked their way through the medley of traffic. Tall, bearded men, and women with tiny parasols and swaying crinolines. A small girl of fourteen gazing at it with awestruck eyes, Alice was fortunate to secure a position as housemaid the first day she arrived in Wellington. The pay was poor, the work hard, but it gave her enough to eat. Later she decided to take up an apprenticeship, but this presented a problem. It meant working for nothing and going hungry in consequence. Stale Buns and Water "I often look back now and wonder how we did manage to exist," she said. "We lived chiefly on stale buns and water. A few of us lodged at the Friendly Society Hostel where beds were 4/- a week and breakfast fourpence. Many of the girls would work through the day with nothing to eat at all. Hunger was a chronic state with us." Alice was eventually forced to give up her apprenticeship and return to ser- vice. At one position she filled at Lower Hutt she used to walk in to Wellington every Sunday to visit a friend. Once, passing the Armed Constabulary Fort at Ngahauranga, she was shocked to see some of the men boxing on the Sabbath. At 19 she was to mafry one of them. » i blll "A Crazy Quilt " "My life, looking back now, seems like e crazy quilt-full of different patterns. I have done so many things: nurserymaid, housemaid, cook, upholsterer and carpet machinist, basket and perambulator maker, shirt manufacturer, barmaid and hotel manageress. A night nurse at a mental asylum. Volunteer nursing throughout the influenza and infantile paralysis epidemics. An officer in the Women’s National Reserve during the last War. Adopted two children, reared and educated them-purchased my own home. Have suffered bitterly and been happy-and have come through it all." To-day, at 73, this remarkable woman is still holding down a job as custodian of a public rest room, where she has been for 14 years. She is ageless. She combines the hardy spirit of the pioneer with the enlightened and progressive living of the present. Life, at 73, is returning her some of the delayed dividends of those long, fighting years. She belongs to the undefeatable.