Not a Fish Story
N a brilliant March morning in the year 1860, a graceful sailing ship rounded the North Head, and dropped anchor in the Waitemata. It was the good ship Blue Jacket. Like her sister-ship, the Red Jacket, she had been a famous China tea clipper, and had many fast passages to her credit, but on
this run she had been becalmed in the Doldrums and the voyage from Liverpool had taken 111 days. As the Blue Jacket rounded the North Head dozens of canoes swarmed out to meet her. No doubt, the Maoris brought many other things to ‘sell, but to a hungry schoolboy, aftér months without fresh fruit, it was -the luscious peaches that remained uppermost in my father’s
memory, Peaches were peaches in the good old days. No brown rot, black spot, or red dot troubled the grower then. That small boy never forgot the Maori kitful he bought that day for a shilling. He tipped them out on his bunk and counted them — 120 blushing beauties! Some kit and some story, sceptics will say. But the number never varied in the telling. Perhaps peach stories took the place of fish stories then, but I’m sure not one peach got away. — ("Colonial Odyssey," Miss Cecil Hull, 1YA, February 2.)
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 140, 27 February 1942, Page 5
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214Not a Fish Story New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 140, 27 February 1942, Page 5
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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