ON FROM MASTERTON

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 383, 25 October 1946, Page 6

ON FROM MASTERTON

Written for "The Listener"

by

SUNDOWNER

HILLS AND SWAMPS

at will be raining in Eketahuna,’ my "Masterton hostess told me as I was Saying good-bye. "It always is." I was not troubled-any more than I was when

they told me in Featnerston how windy I would find it in Martinborough, and in Martinborough how fortunate thev were ‘to live be-

ond the range of the gales that made ife so unpleasant in Featherston. I like these local prides and prejudices, having had them for nearly 60 years myself. But my hostess was right. It was raining in Eketahuna, it rained on each of the three days I stayed there, and it had been raining, the residents themselves confessed, nearly every day for a month. It probably stopped raining the day I left, since the thermometer when I got up was eight below zero, and the whole landscape was white. But I greatly enjoyed Eketahuna. It was cold and wet and windy, but I thought the setting of the borough almost perfect. It is one of those cases where the road and the railway both leave far more than half the story untold. I can’t imagine any change in our national economy that will make it much bigger than it is, or much different; but ‘if I lived there and crossed that bridge every day from one side of the town to the other, if I had gone fishing as a boy in the river and courting as a youth along the cliff walk, I should not want to apologise for it, and I don’t think I should ever resent the weather sufficiently to wish to live somewhere else. In any case, Eketahuna is just one cold spot in a generally cold and damp stretch of country. You are not many miles north of Masterton before you Tealise that the flats are becoming increasingly damp and the hills increasingly unstable and bleak; and this continues until you emerge from what used to be the 40-mile bush. There is of course much beautiful country on the way, some of it limestone. It is highly productive country of New Zealand's most valuable crop. But it is a place for hard men and patient women, and the visitor is a flatterer who calls it smiling land or who praises the rich pockets and sheltered side valleys and is silent about the rest. as x *

MAN WITH A SOLDERING IRON

HERE is a very pleasant road running east from Pahiatua to the coast, not a road to go to sleep on at the wheel, but a road that every fisherman

knows at least halfway. I don’t know whether it is’ true or just a local legend that the Makuri river

is sweeter to trout than all the waters flowing in or out of Taupo, but no one doubts that in Pahiatua. I had to go to Makuri to avoid appearing discourteous to so many kind people who urged me to go, and I am glad I went. But I did not go with my mind on trout and the first of October. I went to see the country:and the people and the animals on the way, and my reward was half-an-hour with one of those unsung New Zealanders whom I always regard as the salt of our land. He was without complexes, or petty grievances; made no unreasonable com-

plaints; was completely unselfconscious; had spent most of his life in one district; worked hard without feeling either virtuous or exploited; had no jealousies, was open and friendly; did not wonder whose "snooper" I was, or think it necessary to entertain me. I saw him working (as I thought) in his garden and went to talk to him; but when I reached him-his home was on a little terrace about 50 feet above road level-it was

not weeds he was wrestling with on his knees, but the spouting from one side of his house, which had rotted through and was being re-made. I admit that I have a weakness for men who can do things with their hands carpentry, plumbing, fencing, car repairs: all the stubborn jobs that confront us at intervals whoever we are and that most of us muddle or funk or pay someone else to do for us. Well this man could not afford to send for plumbers, whose charge, he told me, would have been 5/- a mile to begin with, and then material and skilled labour on top of that. He had to keep his home in order as he kept his garden in order without the assistance of specialists; and although he apologised for what he called his unhandiness with the soldering iron, he .was making a repair that would resist weather and time. "J am using far too much solder, I know. New chums always do. But if I don’t do it well I’ll have to do it over again in a few months, and I can’t afford that either." "Can anyone afford to do any job badly?" I asked him. "No, I don’t suppose so. But in town you can get things done when you want them done. Here it is different." "You might be busy with something else?" "We are always busy with something else. This spouting has been gone for weeks. But first I had to wait to get a new piece, and then had to wait until I -had time to solder it in." "Cows?" "Yes, 16 cows after a day’s work on the roads. I am a county man.’ "And 16 cows before you start work, too?" "Yes, they keep me busy, but they give me a chance to educate my children." "You have your own school here?"

"Yes, but we are afraid of losing it. We are down to nine pupils, and if we lose another we lose our teacher." "What about consolidated schools?" "I am right against them."

"Even when they collect your children and bring them home again?" "Here they would collect them at half-past nine and get them to school at ten. Then they would call for them at half-past two, and they would always be behind the others with their work." It was the nearest he came to a complaint about anything, but it was clear that the education of his children was his big anxiety. He had had very little schooling himself, he said, and he wanted his

children to start without that handicap. "But you are educated," I told him. "You can fix your own spouting. You make these roads. You know when bridges are unsafe. You understand milking machines, and tractors, and @ host. of other things that are completely beyond my range of knowledge." ; "Would you change places with me?" "Well, I'm a little old to think about that now, but I envy you your skills. I hope your boy gets to High School. But don’t worry if he doesn’t. And don’t let him worry. When he is as old as I am it will not seem very important to him where he learnt to live. Not many of us learn that at school." "Are we going to have another war?" "There you are, you see. You catch me right away. I am supposed to know things like that, but I don’t know them a bit better than you do. And I don’t know your jobs at all." "But you know your own." "No, honestly I don’t. You can fix two pieces of tin together and make them stay fixed. I can’t place two pieces of news together and tell you what they will mean next week. I can pretend to, of course, and sometimes the luck will be with me. But luck will never be with you if you just pretend to milk your cows or put in your culverts, So you are better educated than I am. And because you are I will now drive through the rest of this gorge without any anxiety." « And I did. % * *

BIRDS

BECAUSE I go to bed with the birds I find it easy to get up with them, and in the Wairarapa as everywhere else that / means exciting new experiences. -But I

also find it pleasant, after eight years in the bush at Day’s Bay, to be in the open

again where the English birds are. I was in Martinborough before I heard my first lark, but I have gone to sleep every

evening since to the music of blackbirds and thrushes, and- every morning it has been starlings as well. It-was also in Martinborough that I saw my first flights of starlings, hundreds and hundreds of them heading south in the fading light to their camping ground. Always, too, there would be stragglers, two or three sometimes, sometimes one solitary bird flying high and fast in the thickening light, and I found myself wondering what he had been doing to get himself left so far behind. But he always knew where he was going. Another surprise im Martinborough was the presence of some mynahs, which I had never before seen so far south, and did not see again all the way to Woodville. But I am writing this note in the beautiful patch of tawa forest on the outskirts of Pahiatua, and although I saw six tuis here half-an-hour after I came, five of them on the same-small bush, I have not heard one of them in the break-of-day chorus. I have heard one quite late at night; but at dawn they are silent or their notes are drowned by the starlings, blackbirds, and thrushes which swarm in the edge of the bush where I am camped, * * *

PRODUCTION AT A PRICE

DON’T suppose the cost of intensive production is any higher in the Wairarapa than it is anywhere else, but it is high. I saw a pig farm in the North

Wairarapa whose owner had collected nearly a hundred dead cows this spring from the sup-

pliers of one dairy factory. A man who milked only 14 cows a little further on told me that he had lost four calvesmore than 25 per cent. I passed a poultry farm where 800 hens had died; and so on. But the most convincing evidence was in the shop windows. I don’t think I have ever seen so many veterinary aids, genuine and fake, as I saw in the farmers’ supply shops of Masterton and Pahiatua; and it is a case in which the charlatan is just as good a witness as the man of science. Where there is no sickness there are no sales of nostrums good or bad. But if syringes, pellets, drenches, and injections are considered good windowdressing, the manufacturers of these things have a market, and the purchasers of them have panic or something not -far removed from it. * * *

BAD WEATHER

HAVE sometimes been tempted to creep into hotels and wait there for finer weather-like a farmer who milked his cows on fine days and let them rip

when it rained. Dut it is always bad weather for somebody or something on a farm, and when I remembered that

I was almost glad once or twice’to be getting wet. Cook’s company got wet, Tasman’s got wet. Both got cold. Both for days on end endured the noise, the unease, the piled-up irritations of the wind. So did the first wave of pioneers, and the second. But if I found myself accepting mud and rain again at 63, it was not because the discoverers of New Zealand had to endure them or because there was no escape from them'for 50 years for my own father and mother. It was rather that rain and mud have been the farmer’s lot since the beginning of time. He gets wet in the Pacific to-day. But he was getting wet in Europe a thousand years ago, in Asia ten thousand years ago He has been getting wet and cold or parched and hot since it first entered his head

to grow food as well as gather it in, and I cag think of no advance in agricultural science that will keep him always comfortable and clean. So the wind that has hardly stopped blowing since I left Wellington nearly three weeks ago is destiny as well as air in motion. It keeps me in the current .of history from which no farmer ever escapes. I do not find it pleasant. Neither does the man hoeing carrots just through the fence as I am writing this note. With every gust the weeds that must come out get inextricably tangled with the seedlings that must stay in, the dust blows up into his eyes, there is a moment in which he is not master of his fate at all. But man was never master of his fate. The farmer more than any other man (with the probable exception of the fisherman) has defied fate and grappled with it, as that man out there is doing. But the answer to wind is trees, and the farmer who can afford as many shelter belts as the Wairarapa demands is not often hoeing crops by hand. It will take another century at least to protect the Wairarapa against wind, and the best the average farmer can do in the meantime is to fight on hopefully. He can’t master his fate, but he can fight when it tries to master him, and so the wind now blowing dust into that farmer’s eyes, and taking the moisture out of the soil, and threatening to reduce the ground to that bone-hard state which Virgil said. was fatal to husbandry, comes from Eden and beyond, and makes him a soldier in the world’s oldest and most honourable army and myself a kind of camp follower by the mere act of watching him sympathetically.

POLITICS

HAVE not said as much about the people of the Wairarapa as I have about their lands and flocks. But they have said a good deal to me. Some day,

perhaps, I shall repeat what they have said; but not before the end of

November. This is not a political story, directly or indirectly. It is ‘some impressions gathered on a journey of five or six hundred miles made, by accident, a few weeks before a General Election. And I am old enough to remember about a dozen earlier elections, with their excitements, crazy rumours, and frantic passions. It is very unlikely, I think, that the situation in the Wairarapa is either better or worse in this respect than it has’ been a dozen times before, but I

have not before been there on the eve of an election. I don’t know whether the followers of Sir William Russell ever said such things about the followers of Mr. Seddon as I heard some of Mr. Holland’s supporters saying about some of Mr. Fraser’s; but I feel sure that they did. And I feel sure that Radicals in the past said as violent things about Conservatives as some of Mr. Fraser’s followers are now saying about Mr. Holland’s." But I did not hear them said then, and last week I heard them said in the Wairarapa. So I record the fact that the Wairarapa is at present a

little. excited, a _ little credulous, a little ridicu-

lous; but I record it for historical reasons only. Elections pass, but the people remain. The land remains. The eternal struggle with wind and weather and pests -and disease remains. I leave party politics to the party newspapers.

END with a few disjointed notes that space will not allow me to extend, Flowers: One of the delights of the Wairarapa in spring are the hosts of wild daffodils — plain old-fashioned double blooms that no one any longer cultivates. You see them in the cow paddocks, on little islands in swamps, in garden corners where the rubbish goes, decorating ditches, waving on banks and terraces, and marking abandoned paths from front gates to front doors. And once I saw a bucketful of them overshadowing the small goods in a butcher’s window, and casting a kind of golden haze over the masses further in. Earthquakes: One of the surprises is the still-remaining earthqualte damage. It was no doubt reported at the time that the two ’quakes which rocked Wellington in 1942 had nearly destroyed Eketahuna and done an enormous amount of damage in Masterton and Martinborough. We probably knew too that many Carterton and Greytown homes and dozens of isolated farm houses had been jolted, twisted, tilted, and cracked in the most alarming ways. But the war was at a desperate stage. We were incapable of two alarms at once,

and of two waves of sympathy at once, and the woes of the Wairarapa were forgotten. It is a sign of the resources of the territory and of the character of the people that the shock was absorbed with so little knowledge or help from outside and so little fuss at home. Names: One of the misfortunes of the Wairarapa is its name, which will be mispronounced for a _ thousand years, "Wai" will always be "Wy," "rapa" will soon be "rappa," the first "ra" will disappear altogether. Go to a football match and you will know. But "Wy rappa" is not much worse than "Wy rah rahpa," the pedantic alternative, Unless we imitate the Kaffirs, whose vowels have one value when the feet are squarely on the ground and another when the speaker stands on his toes, we shall have to give up the attempt to reach the exact point beween "rahpa" and "ruppa" that is pure Maori and go on Anglicising native names till they have no Maori meaning at all. The next series of ‘articles by "Sundowner," to be published in two or three weeks’ time, will deal with "Wellington West of the Ranges."