IT HAPPENED TO ME

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 238, 14 January 1944, Page 11

IT HAPPENED TO ME

(Written for "The Listener" by

ATORA

HE work of a schoolteacher in a back-country school is not merely a matter of imparting the fundamentals of the primary school curriculum to a group of unsuspecting hopefuls. His life merges of necessity with that of the community, and as a result he is often obliged to help in everything from burying the dead to burying the proverbial hatchet. I remember one busy week shortly after I had been appointed to a small native school, when I was asked to perform the burial service for no fewer than four people-one adult and three children. The first of these was a small Maori baby who had died of pneumonia following the capsize of one of the long, cigar-shaped Maori canoes still used by the Maoris in this district. The baby’s mother had swum for a considerable distance in the flooded Wanganui river with the baby still tied to her back, and unfortunately the cold water proved too much for him. For the whole of the night following the child’s death the tohunga harangued his listeners with an oratory foreign to his everyday manner. In the morning men, women and children looked deathly white. Their faces were drawn and haggard; their bodies listless. Smoke from a fire in the centre of a punga-walled out-house, well away from the main living quarters, filled the building, yet none of the occupants cared. As my wife and I approached the building, on invitation, to take the brief service, we were greeted by the chieftainess who rose to meet us. "Haeremai te pakeha, haeremai," she called, and -as she beckoned, all the huddled forms in the whare rose to their feet. Following the service, the cortege wound its way through tall manuka and over bridle tracks to the cemetery. Only the elders knew where their fathers lay, for graves were strewn through punga clumps down to the edge of the river. Hundred-year-old red manukas mingled with pungas, bearing testimony to the respect in which the tapu was held-and firewood was obtained much further from home. The small casket was lowered on to the new kapok mattress in the grave, and all the child’s personal belongings were strewn around at the foot. Following a very simple service, and with the mother crying a lament, the party dispersed to the nearest creek, and there all the party, children as well as adults, f--- ----_____

ceremoniously cleansed themselves by washing head and hands before proceeding home. The second and third calls on my services that week made me feel as if burial was to be a major part of my duties in this district, but each service made me more accustomed to the strangeness of the rite. By the end of the week, when word came round that an old Maori horse-trainer had succumbed to a lingering illness, we resigned ourselves to the inevitability of the tangi. But as it happened, the day the horse-trainer was to be buried was also one of the greatest days of the year for the district-it was the day of the School Sports. This must have been occupying more of the tohunga’s mind than the forthcoming burial. Early in the morning a sledge, with a rough, boxwood coffin lying on water-fern, was seen bumping over the pig-rooting in the direction of the cemetery. Repetition had made a sacred rite seem commonplace. As the last words of the service were uttered the almost cheerful tohunga asked, "Is that all?" "Yes," I replied. "Oh, well, boys. Heave in the dirt. On with the sports!"