(3) THE FAIRLY GAY NINETIES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 940, 16 August 1957, Page 12

(3) THE FAIRLY GAY NINETIES

RITAIN, in the final years of last century, had dispatched Kitchener to reconquer the Sudan, and after the Jameson raid, was preparing to fight the Boers for ascendancy in the south. New Zealand, under "King Dick" Seddon, had caught the imperialist fever and was trying to carve out an empire in the Pacific. New Plymouth went calmly about its business, absorbing into its education system, without discernible shock, a bright young pupil teacher named Daisy Taylor. Radio broadcasting, later to become Aunt Daisy’s chosen medium, was then little more than a wild surmise, Marconi had been granted the first patent for wireless telegraphy in 1896. By the time a trembling Daisy faced her first class at New Plymouth Central School, ‘in 1897, the inventor was demonstrating to Italian Government officials at Spezia that his magic waves could reach out to warships at sea over the enormous distance of 12 miles. While Daisy perfected her inborn talent for speech, the ingenious Italian proceeded to perfect the medium through which she would be heard. Daisy Taylor began teaching for the somewhat improbable reason that she needed the money. Fares for the voyage to New Zealand had depleted the family’s funds, and after only two years at high school Daisy was obliged to work. She was quick and clever as a pupil and an opening could be found for her in teaching. The starting salary, a princely £20 a year, would at least ease the strain on the family budget. And for a_ girl who worked hard and passed her exams, there was hope of as much as £60 in her fourth year. Already Daisy had a family connection with the teaching profession. Her eldest sister Isabel, usually known as Minnie, had taken up teaching in a small country school at Pukearuhe, boarding with a settler, Constable Seymour, and his wife. She was especially popular for her knowledge, common to all the. Taylor family, of music. Daisy had visited her sister for holidays and liked what she saw of the life and the work. : é; "Teaching in the country," she says, "was a wonderful thing for a girl like Minnie, who'd been brought up in London, very prim and strict always. She’d never taught in her life, and knew nothing about teaching, but she was well educated and was soon accepted." Daisy herself found Pukearuhe memorable for its White Cliffs; for horseback rides-perched side-saddle-through the tunnel to Mokau; and for the steep bush tracks along which recruits for the Hau Hau movement had passed in the last stages of the Maori Wars. Less than 30 years before, a war party of NegatiManiapoto had murdered a number of settlers there, climaxing their day of slaughter by firing seven shots into the body of the missionary, Rev. John Whiteley, as he knelt in- prayer. ‘Minnie’s host, Seymour, was a gaitered member of the Armed Constabulary which later garrisoned the Pukearuhe redoubt. : The journey on horseback by tunnel and cattle-drive to Mokau arouses in

Aunt Daisy other, more romantic recollections. "The big landowner and chief man around there," she says, "was Mokau Jones. Nowadays I would say his son was just an ordinary farm young man, but then, well, you know, I thought he was all right then." Certainly the Jones youngster was no match for the quick-witted Daisy. As she talked and mimicked and entertained them all, he would sit awestruck, and finally, with his slow smile, declare: "Oh, Daisy, you’re incorrigible." S a pupil teacher, Daisy kept her incorrigibility well in hand and toiled hard. She was only sixteen years old, but that did not prevent her .from maintaining a scholastic rivalry with Dick Thomas, pupil-teacher at the nearby Stratford School,;-and winning hands down. "I had to beat him every year," she says, "and I did, of course." Without benefit of a Teachers’ College, Daisy Taylor learned the pedagogue’s skills by doing the job. "We went to work every morning at eight o’clock," she says, "and for an hour ‘the

headmaster or his deputy would give lessons in one or other of our subjects until it was time to take the class at nine." For the first year Daisy taught mostly under supervision by another teacher, doing, the menial jobs and marking dictation books. At the Central School, which she had attended as a pupil, she found the atmosphere congenial, But the third year brought change. The young trainee was appointed to New Plymouth’s South Road School; headmistress, Miss Shaw. This lady and her sister, Mrs. Douglas, were pillars of New Plymouth society. "They were very, very Victorian," says Aunt Daisy. "They never’ lounged. I never saw one of them lean back. They couldn’t lean back! Miss Shaw’s favourite remark was that ‘Young people of today have no deportment!’ " Later, Daisy grew to love this uncompromising Victorian gentlewoman, even riding to school with her in her two-horse cab. But the first impression was never to be forgotten. Daisy presented herself at the school and was looked up and down.

"Oh," said Miss Shaw, "are you Daisy Taylor?" "Yes, if you please, Miss Shaw, I am." "Well, I don’t know what usé you’re going to be to me! The School Committee, they take away from me Miss Mynott, who could manage things, and they send-you! What can you do? I don’t know what use you're going to be at all!" Daisy quailed. She felt that her mere existence was an affront to all strict, upright, God-fearing, unbending Victorian women. She scuttled away to prepare her first lesson as ordered. It was an object lesson. The object: a brick. Daisy was careful not to drop it. While Miss Shaw terrorised her classes with sudden questions like, "Now, Lucy Simpson, where’s Mount Popocatepetl?" Daisy learned her calling, and studied hard for exams. She (continued on page 14)

The Aunt Daisy story

(continued from page 12) completed the normal four-year course for pupil-teachers in three years, and in the final examination, took first place in science in competition with the pupilteachers of the entire colony. In a letter dated March 16, 1900, her old headmaster at Central School, H: Dempsey, wrote his congratulations: "The fact of taking the first. prize in the Colony in Science is something to be proud of, and you deserve very great credit for having gained such a distinction." UT of school, Daisy enjoyed whatever New Plymouth had to offer. Her mother, used to Gilbert and Sullivan and Sims ‘Reeves and the Gaiety Girls, considered it very little. Daisy, without the same standards of comparison, found it good and sufficient. The serious side of life was catered for by the church foremost, but in part also by a debating club known as the Mutual Improvement Society. Everybody who was anybody belonged, but the debates were distinguished by a fearless quest for truth that took no count of social station. "I remember one subject which we thought was dreadful and treasonable,"’ says Aunt Daisy. "It shocked me to the core! It was Has Britain Reached the Zenith of Her Power? Ohhh! I thought, what a dreadful thing to think of! Oh! I still feel like that!" At New Plymouth, too, Daisy saw her first plays, The Silver King and Hamlet, performed by visiting players in the Alexandra Hall. And on Saturcay afternoons, she learned to dance-the schottische, the polka and the barn dance, the mazurka, the quadrille, the lancers and the varsovienne. Later she rode to dances at the Freeling homestead at Waitara, with her evening clothes in a parcel tied to the saddleriding home again towards dawn when the dance broke up and the young men went off to milk. But in the early days of her teacher training, the event of the week was still choir practice. "It was a big night," says Aunt Daisy. "All the other girls used to come out of choir practice and their boys would be waiting. Your mother would be somewhere in the offing, of course, but you walked with your own boy. That is, everybocy except us! Katie and I were considered very fair and pretty, and we regularly got asked, but mother would stay with us. There’s a song about that, I think. It’s called ‘Her Mother Came, Too!’" ’ To singing lessons, however, Daisy went alone. The teacher was a Mr Cornwall, an ex-railwayman so dedicated to music that he had put his family in financial straits in order to study abroad under an Italian master named Moretti. She learned to sing the Italian way"Italians just stand up and sing’without strain or mannerisms or contortions of the face. "We used to stand in front of a full-length mirror," she says. "You couldn’t look at yourself in a mirror and be such a fool as to a faces!" Cornwall taught her also to nae Ce her voice far into the ether-‘Remem-ber that deaf old gentleman at the back. He’s got to understand. You’ve got to move him-make him laugh, or make tim cry." With memories, as with life, Aunt Daisy plumps for the brightest and best. New Plymouth town in the gay nineties doats back into memory with its streets

decorated for Christmas, the shops vying with one another in a profusion of oldworld, yuletide red and green. The new land provided only the materials-red-hot-poker flowers for red, and punga fern for green. Maoris sat along the kerbs, peddling not holly or mistletoe, but tree and maidenhair fern. Sometimes the quiet citizens were hammered into activity. Daisy would be startled awake in the night by the clangour of firebells rousing the volunteers. Then the town listened \as the bell signalled. Morse-like the direction of the blaze-north, south, east or west. Other alarums also came in the night, as the young men of Tukapa Football Club dispersed after their weekly practice. Milk-bar cowhands of their day, they spurred their thunderous horses through the silent streets with wild whoops and yells-galloping vigilantes in a region whose borders were tather herbaceous than Mexican. ‘TOWARDS the end of her pupil-teach-ing, Daisy saw other, more serious, squadrons of horsemen ride through the streets on their way to embark for the Boer War. Later she was to march with sad parades of her schoolchildren, wearing their father’s medals and singing songs like "Soldiers of the Queen" and "The Boers Have Got My Daddy"... I don’t like to see my Mummy cry I don’t like to hear my Mummy sigh I'm a-going in a big ship across the raging main, I’m a-going to fight the Boers, I am, And bring my Daddy home again. ‘Her teacher’s training finished, Daisy was "planted down and given charge" of a country school at Warea, near Opunake, with 42 pupils ranging in classes from Primer I to. Standard VI. The Warea people gave her a great welcome, holding a community social in her honour. Everyone came to look

her over. "All the school committee men were there," she says, "and they looked me up and down and thought how small _and girlish-looking and incapable I was."’, One by one, these hulking elders of the village concluded that such a pint-sized teacher must require manly help. They sidled up to her in turn and said: "Now if you have any trouble with those big boys, Miss Taylor, you just send for me. I’ll come and lam them!" In fact, some of the big boys who had rejected school in favour of work on the farm returned to the schoolroom for the specific purpose of having fun at the expense of the petite new female teacher, There is an old law which says that when God created the world he made man the strongest; but He. gave women equal chance; He made her tongue the longest. Those who came to scoff learned the force of this saying the hard way. They rapidly discovered the advantages latent in a good vocabulary, and remained to learn for themselves. The welcome social itself was a far from sedate affair. "Talk about Rock ’n’ Roll!" says Aunt Daisy. "It was nothing to a figure in the Lancers! The men were all hefty, country young men, and they liked getting me because I was so small. They just grabbed me round the waist and I went sailing. through the air. Then they’d change to the other arm and the other direction. My feet never touched the ground at all!" T every opportunity Daisy continued to visit the Freelings at Waitara. For a time, as a pupil-teacher, she had held an appointment there. "Ethel Freeling and I were very fond of poetry," she says. "We used to lie on the same bed and recite poetry by the yard. And we

wrote poetry. The only one I can remember ended with ‘. . . the rattle of the milk-pails-and you!’ Oh, I was very fond of Ethel. I used to fret when I went back to New Plymouth to my mother, away from Waitara where I’d been so happy." It must have been an emotional time for the adolescent Daisy. She confesses to being "terribly in love" with both the Freeling boys as well. "They were both grown up," she says, "but I was always in love with somebody very much older than myself. My husband was very. much older than me, too. I never liked the young ones. I was rather frightened of them." City-bred Daisy was also. rather frightened of cows-an uncomfortable syndrome for a Taranaki resident. But when the boys challenged her-the new chum-to learn the art of milking, she stilled her cringing nerves and tossed at them defiantly the statement, "Of course I can milk!" The boys brought her a one-legged milking stool, a bucket, and a serene-looking milch cow named Lorna Doone. Out in the paddock, without benefit of cowbails, Daisy addressed herself to the animal’s unpromising teats. "But the boys knew what Lorna Doone would do,’ says Aunt Daisy. "She looked round at me with her mild eyes; and, as soon as I began to milk, shé just walked on. Left me! Left me sitting there on my one-legged stool." Her luck with cows was consistent. Taranaki was then covered with hoardings advertising Sykes’ Red Drench. a potent physic for cattle. The hoarding depicted, im raw..colours, an enormous blown’ cow-"all swollen up and looking dreadful’’-surrounded ‘by a mourn‘ul group of gaitered farmers. It bore the legend, in letters a foot. high, POOR DAISY! I MIGHT HAVE SAVED HER! Poor Daisy Taylor’s pupils and fellow teachers took up the refrain with no counterfeited glee. \VHILE Daisy traipsed across the damp green paddock after the elusive Lorna Doone, a man about ten years older than she looked wearily at his baking, dehydrated segment of Victoria’s Mallee country. In a clipped, English accent, he uttered a florid Australian swear-word. He had just bid good-day to a Methodist clergyman who had called to solicit contributions for the Harvest Festival. "Damn it all!" he had replied, "don’t you know there’s a drought round here? I've never seen a harvest!" Frederick Basham had been born in London, and educated at Chigwell Grammar School in Essex, the school at which the William Penn who gave his name to Pennsylvania had been educated. He entered his uncle’s estate agency, but was not a notable success. He had little idea of the value of money and his uncle was frequently obliged to pay his debts. He committed no offences. He simply spent too much money. Finally, like many a well-heeled Englishman of his day, uncle seized on the obvious way out. "We'll send him abroad," he said, "to Australia." So Fred Basham was given a farm in Victoria with some money to carry on with, and the family washed their hands of him. The ‘young Englishman never did have much luck with real estate. After four years of drought, when the local storekeepers could extend their credit no farther, he sold his worthless land and went to Tasmania, When the opportunity came to enter civil engineering, Fred Basham seized it. He spent some years in Hobart learning his new calling uncer the kindly eye of Mr Grove, his |

employer, before he felt able to branch | out on his own. He then applied for a job in New Zealand, as assistant to New Plymouth’s Borough Engineer, W. E. Spencer, and was duly appointed. The Borough set him to work designing new public baths at the New Plymouth breakwater. Casting about for accommodation, Frederick Basham settled upon a boarding establishment called Chatsworth House. There, on ‘the first morning, he was seated at breakfast immediately opposite a young schoolteacher named Daisy Taylor. The two English people coolly looked each other over. He was dark, handsome, moustachioed. She was pretty, blonde and petite. They disliked each other on sight. (To be continued)