(2) New Plymouth Ho!

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 939, 9 August 1957, Page 12

(2) New Plymouth Ho!

F Victorian London was the greatest capital on earth, it also suffered the greatest headaches. Unemployed demonstrators ‘were breaking some very distinguished windows in Pall Mall. Charles Booth published maps of London, using colours to show the varying Gegrees of poverty, street by street. About 30 per cent of Londoners lived below what he called the "poverty line." In the Reading Room of the British Museum, a man was still busy writing his remedy for this decaying economy. His name was Karl Marx. The middle classes, into which Aunt Daisy was born, felt the pressure if not the pinch of the twenty-year depression. With them the general insecurity was expressed by dignity of behaviour, and a frugal and pious way of life. Queen Victoria herself set the example. "I don’t think -my mother was left well off, though we didn’t really lack anything," says Aunt Daisy. "But I know we were very careful with all our things. It was an age of being careful. Nothing was wasted. You didn’t leave @ tap running." Withal, the family afforded at least one servant, sometimes two, and the children were well if not richly dressed. One year little Daisy wore a pretty, plum-coloured velvet coat with box pleats. The next year she wore the same coat, with bands of beaver fur sewn to the hem and collar and cuffs to allow for growth. Each Sunday morning the whole family went to church, and in the afternoon the children to Sunday School. Piety was as natural a part of the order of things as patriotism or poverty or perpendicular architecture. "Ours was an old church with rafters," Aunt Daisy remembers. "The clergyman was a Mr Pinkington, a tall man with a beautiful face. He used to stand in the pulpit and look around, and each of us felt that he was looking at her. We used to adore him from the distance." . Church services then were longer, but were not therefore a time for the children to fidget. There was no tying of pigtails to the backs of the pews. "I do not remember that we ever got into trouble at all," says Aunt Daisy. "The children sang, and chanted the responses and enjoyed it all. I think it’s a pity now that in the craze and anxiety to -make services shorter they no longer read all the Commandments. I think they should be read at one service a month, at least." She recalls the recent story about the small boy preparing for confirmation in the Church. He was required to know the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments. When asked if he knew the Commandments, the boy replied, "No, Sir." The vicar, aghast, inquired: "You don’t know the Ten Commandments! What’s your name?" And the boy replied, "Moses, Sir." WHILE Daisy Taylor learned the Commandments at church, other proposals were being made for the

succour of suffering mankind. They were the ten expedients of William Booth, the ex-pawnbroket’s apprentice who founded the Salvation Army. And, while Daisy and her family did not concern themselves with the deliverance of the poor, the convicted, the alcoholic or the fallen, they did attend some of the Army’s services. "I remember being taken to the Congress Hall," says Aunt Daisy. "It was a tremendous place. Sometimes a curtain had to be drawn half-way across to make it smaller. And they sang beautiful hymns-mission hymns that appeal to children-to emotional children-which appealed to me very much, I think there’s a warmth about the Salvation Army-a reality and closeness to people, I’ve always been attracted by them." It may have been this attraction which prompted Daisy Taylor to declare later on that if she had not become a broadcaster she would have liked to be a missionary. And there have been times when she has kept the two roles separate only in name. If her Christianity inclined toward the active and muscular, the young Daisy’s recreation was decidedly ladylike and genteel. Victorian schools showed less faith in the Spartan virtues of sport than the schools of today. Daisy played an occasional game of rounders, but was forbidden croquet on the grounds that the mallet was unmanageably bigger than she was. But the two younger girls and their friend Kata Graeger had the run of Mr Graeger’s factory and blissfully rode this limited range in a precarious, uncovered wagon. Kata was German, and

Daisy and Katie picked up impossibly compound nouns the while they toughened their muscles. Most recreation took more sedentary forms. There was much recitation and singing and playing the piano. Daisy learned German lieder, an accomplishment that was to be useful later on. She read all of Dickens’s books except the frightening ones, which were forbidden. With rather less gusto, she plodded through Sir Walter Scott. She laughed roundly at Jerome K. Jerome’s| Three Men in a Boat, and wriggled her toes excitedly among the fabulous colonial characters of Mark Twain, = ER first association with the colony of New Zealand was literally disastrous. In 1886 London shuddered at ‘the news of Tarawera’s violent eruption, and its people, Daisy included, heard details of the tragic extinction of Te Wairoa village and the destruction of one of the world’s wonders, the Pink and White Terraces. For someone who was afterwards to declare that she would not live anywhere but in New Zealand, it was an unpromising introduction. Daisy’s next contact was more intimate and personal, but hardly more promising. It took the form of William Courtenay, the London-based employee of a New Zealand company. A friend of the family, he frequently visited the Taylor’s house. And the smallest child inevitably received most attention. "I remember Mr Courtenay would sit me on his knee," says Aunt Daisy, "and he would kiss me, although we were a most undemonstrative family. He had a long beard, and I used to shudder! But Mama

would nod to me-I mustn’t show I didn’t like it. That would be ill-mannered." Through the bearded Courtenay, the family met the Freelings, a farming couple from Bishop’s Stortford, with seven children and a common interest in music, poetry and reading. They.were planning to migrate to New Zealand, and they urged Daisy’s mother Elizabeth Taylor, to uproot her home and do likewise. They were backed up by Daisy’s restless elder brother, Bertie, who yearned for the free and open spaces. His impatience brought him to New Zealand ahead of the rest of his family. For the others, the step was not taken till Mrs Taylor broke off her engagement and began to wonder what next. William Courtenay was on hand to urge, "Why not come to New Zealand?" Mrs Taylor considered, Indeed, why not? Somehow she raised the money for their fares. The Taylor fainily, she decided, was going to the colonies. "FOR a young person,’ says Aunt Daisy, "coming to New Zealand was a terrific event. We were all getting ready, and saying goodbye to our friends, and I remember being taken for a final time to see Westminster Abbey and the other sights of London." The voyage, via the Cape of Good Hope, is only a hazy remembrance. Teneriffe, Table Mountain with its cloth on, and Tasmania, all slipped by. Their novelty could not quite overwhelm the children’s sadness and homesickness for London. New countries, new towns and people, the ship itself carving deep-blue tropical water, seemed like the flitting, silver flying-fish, unsubstantial when compared with the solid stonework of solid Victorian London. The S.S. Rimutaka, Captain Greenstreet commanding, brought the family (continued on page 14)

The Aunt Daisy | Story (continued from pa a 12)

to Wellington on August 13, 1891. At Wellington they embarked in a smaller vessel, the Gairloch, for New Plymouth. Mrs Taylor had decided to settle there because she had friends in the district. By this time the Freelings, from Bishop’s Stortford, had taken up a farm at Waitara, 14 miles distant. "Our first impressions of New Zealand were wonderful," says Aunt Daisy. "We thought it was marvellous to walk along grassy paths lined with ferns and geraniums. And there were atum lilies down the gullies, growing wild! We'd never before seen more than five or six together-all hothouse. "The people were very kind, but what struck us most was the way they made tea and had it with their meals-even when there was meat! Perhaps it was because water had to be boiled always. "And everybody was asking you to meals-and there were tables spread with scones-always scones-everybody made batches of scones every day. And there was always sponge cake-that’s the New Zealand national cake-great hunks of sponge cage with cream in the middle." : Already the colony had developed a dialect of its dwn. Aunt Daisy can remember Mr Dempsey, headmaster of the New Plymouth Central School, and a Belfast man, lecturing ~his pupils: "Don’t say ‘daown taown’! It’s two onesyllable words, ‘down town.’" Having never pronounced it any other way, Daisy found Gifficulty in seeing what he was driving at. But if the locals puzzled her, the precise, well-spoken, London-bred Daisy caused no little stir among the locals. "They pulled my leg,’ she says, "and | I didn’t even know what leg-pulling was. I thought it was asking a lot of silly questions. They were really taking me off all the time. I spoke very precisely and was very particular. New Plymouth was quite countrified then, and they were real country children." AISY discovered also that the Victorian principle that children be seen and not heard did not apply in the colonies. At the Central School | she made friends with Gertie Rickerby,

daughter of the Governor of the jail, and she soon discovered that at home Gertie was the governor. Gertie was a_ sweet and gentle girl, but any request by her was greeted by a solicitous mother with "Whatever you would like to have, Gertie, dear. You know you have only to ask and you can have anything you would like. You have only to ask, Gertie, dear." Daisy listened fascinated. How strangely people behaved on this outer edge of civilisation! At home she treated her mother and sister to an exact mimicry of the incident. They too marvelled, and "Whatever you would like to have, Gertie, dear," became a family saying in the Taylor household. Arriving at New Plymouth, the family had as a matter of course joined the congregation of the Church of St Mary. For New Zealand, it was an old and historic place. White settlers had taken refuge there during the Maori wars. Elizabeth Taylor and her children heard of this and reacted accordingly. "My mother was terrified," says Aunt Daisy. "We used to go for long walks up the old. Hospital Road, and sometimes _we’d meet some Maoris. They were perfectly harmless, sensible Maoris, of course, walking along with flax kits and ferns to trade for clothes in town. But we used to huddle together in fright." School, at first, was frightening, too. The young English girl found it hard to ‘mix without formality with "all those wild New Zealanders." The atmosphere was quite different from the calm and regulated order of the Academy for Young Ladies. Here, too, there were boys, a hearty, rough-spoken lot. Daisy heard their precise, Irish headmaster correcting them: "Now, boys, I was walking along the other day and I heard one of you boys-one of you---say something about a ‘bloke.’ A bloke! You know, that’s not a very gentlemanly word-to call a man a ‘bloke.’ " UT the adaptable Daisy soon settled in, and school became an endless source of material for high-spirited play acting and mimicry. She got her comeuppance one day while satirising for a group* of school-fellows the headmaster’s own rendition of The Charge of the Light Brigade. "Flashed all their sabres bare!" she ceclained. "Flashed as they turned in air! Sabring the gunners there; charging an army-while all the world wondered!"

. She turned to savour the applause of her audience--and met the glacial eye of the headmaster. We are not to know what followed. It has somehow slipped Aunt Daisy’s memory. What she does recall is Mr Dempsey’s own idea of a joke. The Central School was built on a large recreation area known as Poverty Flat. Once. a year, Wirth’s Circus also used the ground and the children were allowed to help the workmen erect the big top. When ,this was nearly up, all hands straining on the ropes, Mr Dempsey would appear and blow his whistle. Ever obedient, the youngsters dropped everything and ran to school. The billowing tent descended like a deflated balloon on the cursing circus-hands. Only the headmaster ever really understood the unique comedy of this event. From Poverty Flat, Daisy moved with a scholarship to New Plymouth High School, then a mixed institution with another Irishman, Mr Pridham, as headmaster, and Miss Montgomery as headmistress. Sometimes she walked to school of a morning with one Harold White, better known nowadays as H. Temple White, conductor and musician. Even then, she recalls, he was cultivat-ing-on his mother’s orders-the beginnings of the distinguished beard he now wears. He suffered with stoic indifference the taunts of his schoolmates. Whatever the children did, Aunt Daisy remembers, the teachers remained in masterful control. "Miss Montgomery was very prim and very strict. My mother approved of her; she was quite our kind of person. And I remember one day a girl stuck a pin in another girl and she let out a little scream, Ohhh! Miss Montgomery simply looked up from her book and said quietly,

‘There is a girl in pain, I fear.’" Mr Pridham used similar tact with the queue of hot and nervous girls who lined up against the wall each week, their hands sticking to the varnish, to

be heard in recitation. Shapeless Nelly Kelly, from Lepperton Junction, was struck speechless with self-conscious-ness. When asked, "Well, now, Nelly Kelly, what have you to say?" she writhed in silence for a minute and finally burst out with, "God Knows, Mr Pridham!" And the headmaster quietly observed, "I’ve no doubt He does." For the chubby, extroverted little Daisy, recitation held no such terrors. She had _ performed from _ infancy before auditors at least as critical as Mr Pridham. Unlike her friend Grace Fookes, whose tastes ran to poems like "The Slave in the Dismal Swamp," she would usually choose something amusing or slightly daring, on the lines of "The Editor’s Story," or "You Are Old, Father William." Or, when forced into seriousness, it might be Byron’s "Prisoner of Chillon" or Longfellow’s_ long "Evangeline."

AT home, at play, at school, but most of all in the choir of St Mary’s Church, Daisy sang. "I really had a voice," she says. "I could sing high, low, or any way at all. It was not till after-

watds when I had lessons that they made me a contralto. And in those days everybody sang. The congregation did not sit and listen to the choir. Nor was there so much unaccompanied singing, which is dreadful!" The accompartiment, however, came at a price. "In those days the old St Mary’s organ was wearing out," Aunt Daisy recalls, "and the organist, Ezra Brooke, had to be quite an acrobat as well as an oftganist. He would play a psalm and then swoop behind the organ to slap a piece of brown paper on a pipe or something. Then he’d slide back into his seat and we’d sing ‘Amen.’ " The choristers also performed in the Sunday School hall at the periodical concerts. Daisy sang favourites like "The Old Folks at Home" and "Love’s Old Sweet Song," and, following Amy Sherwin’s success in Australia with "Coon" songs, she carolled "Ma CurlyHeaded Babby" ("Honey, you play in your own backyard; don’t mind what them white chiles do.") She learned then, in the hardest way of all, how to please an audience. : She pleased herself, too. Speaking of their most ambitious production of those days, Trial by Jury, she becomes, even now, almost incoherent with pleasure, .. "I was the plaintiff-and there’s the judge on the bench-he was Jack Ryan -and he had a beautiful voice-and I was, I suppose, about sixteen-and, of course, every young girl has a pash on somebody older-and I remember I was so terribly excited because I had to go up and put my arms round him-and then later he came down and he said, ‘I will marry her myself." Ohhh! It was a moment, you know!" (To be continued)