(4) The Battle of the Sexes

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 941, 23 August 1957, Page 12

(4) The Battle of the Sexes

]¥ only the brave deserve the fair, then Frederick Basham deserved his Daisy. Besides his own bachelor yearning ‘or freedom, he had to overcome opposition by his fiancée’s friends, and the irresolution of Daisy herself. Eventually he took her to wife by means of a most audacious swindle. The initial frigidity across the break-fast-table at Chatsworth House took time to thaw. "I thought he was a most awful man," says Aunt Daisy. "I didn’t like him at all. He seemed very snappy and bad-tempered. I don’t think he liked me very much either." But the day came when Fred Basham realised that the schoolmarm across the table was a decidedly attractive young woman... At the same moment, Daisy decided that the grumpy engineer seated opposite was a not entirely repulsive young man. Next morning he suggested they go to a concert together. Neither surprised nor Ccispleased, Daisy was nonetheless a little coy. She had never been out with a man before. "Oh!" she stammered. "Oh, I suppose so-yes." With the ice broken, the pair plunged delightedly into the water and found it fine. Soon, in the watchful provincial town, they were inventing excuses for being together. An unmarried girl had to be strictly proper, but the chapérone system was not inflexible, and there was a usable margin of liberty. Sometimes they would visit Mrs Sykes (wife to the inventor of Sykes Red Drench). And with a smile the good lady would say, "Oh, you won’t be wanting me here, Daisy. I'll leave you two in the drawingroom together." The young people would sit splendidly alone, feeling thoroughly uncomfortable. The Rev. Frederick Bennett, later first Bishop of Aotearoa, provided the courting pair with yet another pretext. At Bell Block, where he was then minister, he held occasional concerts. "He was a magnificent speaker with the most beautiful imagery," says Aunt Daisy. "We shall never have another Maori to talk as he did. All his coun-

try’s legends were used to illuminate the Gospel. And he had a magnificent singing voice.’ He had the added advantage of staging his concerts at a distance of four-and-a-half miles from New Plymouth. Keen _ concertgoers though they were, Daisy and Fred enjoyed the performances less than the nine miles travel with nobody for company but themselves. FRED BASHAM remained, however, a man’s man. "Sometimes we’d walk along the sea-front to a seat and talk," says Aunt Daisy. "But after a while he’d- say, ‘Well, Tiny, it’s nine o’clock. Can’t keep you. up any longer. It’s time I had a talk to some men.’ I suppose it was in a mood that he got married. He really wasn’t cut out to be." Nor, as far as Daisy could discover, had Fred Basham ever cut a swathe in the ranks of the opposite sex. "I only heard of one sweetheart," she says, "and she was called Beatrice. He had a photograph of her taken in Hobart. She was such a lovely girl, I was so dreadfully jealous!" But as always with the dauntless and durable Daisy, she thrust the devils aside and took pleasure in the high spots of her courtship. "In those days," she recalls, "people had long linen tablecloths. If your sweetheart happened to be helping you to fold them, when you got to the middle, of course, you kissed. We weren’t entirely without romance, you know!" Before long the pair became engaged to be married, but the engagement threatened to be endless. A Victorian upbringing led at best to strained and timid relations between the sexes. Aunt Daisy remembers it now as similar to Dick Bentley’s complaint about the BBC: "There’s Es. ... and there’s Middle . . . and there’s Sus. . .. We’re not allowed to say the rest." After her wedding Daisy was to blush and stammer over the ordeal of calling the groom her "husband." It was months before she ceased calling him "Mister Basham." Meantime, she evaded the terrifying

prospect of marriage by continuing to postpone the day. In her Fabian policy, Daisy had allies. The prospective groom was not to every woman a knight in shining armour. A friend, Mrs Lennon, declared

with unremitting persistence: "I don’t \ know, Daisy! I really don’t know what your dear mother would have said if she’d known you were going to marry that badtempered man!" S mere man does at times, Fred Basham at last took the initiative. He had been appointed Hawera’s County Engineer, and at Hawera he engineered a simple but most effective plot. His first move was. to rent from the retiring engineer a cottage for himself and his bride. His second was to brief. two

friends, Dr and Mrs Brown, with whom Daisy sometimes stayed. In Margaret, the wife, he too found an ally. When next the unsuspecting Daisy came to stay Margaret chaperoned her visits to the cottage. They made tea for Fred when he came to call. Daisy noticed her friend and her financé whispering together, but paid little attention. She was in consequence ill-pre-pared when Fred Basham breezed in one morning with the jaunty air of a man whose horse has just won the Ten Thousand Guineas. "Tt’s all settled, Tiny," he announced. "You’ve got to be married here! I’ve got the licénce and it says you've. got to be married in three days!" It was a masterful piece of acting. Daisy was floored. "That just shows," she says now, "how innocent I was and how little I knew. The licence said you couldn’t be married till three days had elapsed, but it certainly didn’t compel you to be married within three days! Oh, I was always easily taken in!" Daisy had plans for a big wedding in New Plymouth, but she forgot this in her shock, and reacted with a truly (continued on page 14)

The Aunt Daisy Story (continued from page 12)

feminine irrelevance. "I can’t," she stuttered. "I can’t possibly get a dress in that time!" Margaret Brown was ready for this. "What about that white silk evening frock you wore at the concert the other week?" she suggested. "So I was married," says Aunt Daisy, "in a white silk evening dress that I'd worn to a concert. That’s how I was inveigled into marriage." Daisy Taylor became Mrs Basham in St Mary’s Church, Hawera, one morning in 1904, soon after nine o'clock. The service had to be early because the groom was due at a council meeting at eleven. The bride was followed down the aisle by a flower-girl named Hazel Wrigley, bearing a bouquet not of daisies, but violets. Daisy bore up well Curing most of the service, but when it came to joining in the singing herself she broke down and wept. "If you’re going to cry at your wedding," muttered a friend, "give me a nice cheerful funeral!" Soon after, the groom slipped away to his council meeting. "Excuse me, gentlemen," he apologised. "I’m a little excited this morning. I’ve just been married!" The councillors thought him an enterprising fellah. They rose in‘a body to offer their congratulations. Daisy retired to prepare for the evening reception-in a fluster of embarrassment about her new status. "I was so shy about saying ‘husband,’ and the women tried to make me," Aunt Daisy

recalls. "It was so silly. We had such unnecessary anxiety in those days. Today things like that are so much easier --so ordinary and casual and happy." On the question of names, she continued to waver between the extreme formality of "Mister" and the familiarity of "Fred." Finally, when her- condition allowed, she compromised with "Dad." "THE arrival of Daisy’s first baby the following year was an unmixed delight -at first. "Once you'd had the child you wore beautiful nightgowns and dressing jackets and everything. And you weren't made to get up and walk as you are now. You stayed in bed for two or three weeks. Your husband thought you were wonderful, and all your friends came to see you, leaning over the bed and saying how lovely you were." But when the nurse, Mrs Gomer, departed, Daisy was left no longer holding court, but nervously. holding the baby. Motherhood suddenly became neither decorative nor restful. Plunket was then in its own infancy, and Daisy acted mostly on the advice of innumerable "well-informed" wives. The consequence was that little Freddy’s diet and feeding times were changed as often as his mother heard a new idea. He became, not surprisingly, somewhat confused. He howled continuously night and day, ceasing only when held by the confident nurse, Mrs. Gomer. He drove the young Mrs Basham into a nervous. disorder, for which she sought therapy at the popular spa of Rotorua. The baby was sent for the time to Auckland and the care of Daisy’s elder sister Katie, who by then was married to a young New Zealand Herald reporter named Ernest Muir. : Fred Basham took refuge from his squalling first-born in the calm, uncomplicated company of men. "Dad really shouldn’t have married," says Aunt Daisy. "He was a clubman at heart, and he continued to be a clubman. After the first few weeks, he’d say, ‘Oh, well, Tiny, I suppose you'll want to go to bed now. I think I'll just go and have a game of cards with the men.’ " Back home again, Daisy slowly learned to cope with her child. Dr Frederick Truby King was then toiling to spread knowledge of his system to just such bewildered young wives as she, but it was not till her second and third children, when the need had substantially passed; that she began to hear much of the great man’s work. AISY’S housekeeping, too, could have benefited from the advice of just such a household sage as she herself was later to become. There was Mrs Beeton, of course, but she was inclined to assume a knowledge of certain basic details. Daisy learned these rather from her succession of maids. The first of these was an Irish girl named Lizzie, a quick, bright and capable maid whose ability so overawed Daisy that she addressed rthe girl respectfully ‘ag "Miss." Aunt Daisy remembers bearing to the kitchen a basin of rice to ask Lizzie whether it was enough. She had never cooked rice before. Nor had she read the Forester story in which Hornblower’s -ricefilled ship, holed below the waterline, bursts apart under the pressure of swelling grain. She was astonished when the brisk Irishwoman informed her the measure of rice was just four times too much, The servants in their turn sometimes provided the laughs. A washerwoman, Mrs Onions, confessed one day to having a daughter named Violet. Fred Basham talked at the club for weeks after of the "conglomeration of aromas" which had invaded his house. Hawera itself was no metropolis, but Daisy,. as always, found that things

seemed to happen. She could have done with a Morning Session in which. to share her experiences. There was, for instance, the time the burglars called. The night before payday each week, Fred Basham, county engineer, kept the men’s payroll in the house. He had a revolver to protect the cash, but Daisy, of a nervous disposition, flinched at every living thing that bumped in the night. Trouble came, however, in the daylight. Daisy rode. out in the gig with her husband to distribute the wage packets, but returned to find the house had been ransacked. Missing the payroll, the robbers had had to content themselves with Daisy’s jewellery and the grand total of 6/6 in cash. Both items were returned by the police soon after when they caught the two culprits. Even then Daisy showed the compassion for the underdog that was later to colour her work in radio. "They owned up and were put in jail," she says. "They were very young and they had their girl-friends with them. I remember feeling very sorry for them." \V ITH plenty of space in the garden at Hawera, Daisy took to raising chickens, nicknaming the birds after her fri®mds according to personality. One she remembers was a smal] and bustly bird called Mrs Malcolmson. Throughout her life in the country, Daisy continued her poultry farming. It was fun, and not unprofitable. "I used to sell the eggs and keep the money," she says. "And Dad paid for the fowl food. It was a very nice idea." For journeys about Hawera, Daisy and her husband travelled in a gig drawn by Darkie, a temperamental horse which shied at any unusual object. Later it became Daisy’s turn to shy at an unusual object-the vehicle in which Fred Basham met her at the station following a visit to Rotorua. He had bought his first horseless carriage. Named by its makers the Phoenix, the vehicle showed little of the renewed

youth with which the mythical bird-ts said to have risen from the ashes. The name may have been suggested by what appeared to be a perforated ash-can, which did duty as a bonnet. From this jutted an enormously long steering column, mounted with a collection of horns not unworthy of a small orchestra. The player sat behind in a highbacked double seat of the ornate kind found normally between the horses on merry -go-rounds. The whole was mounted on four large wire wheels fitted with the flimsy, puncture-prone Indiarubber tyres of the day. "Ooh! Can you drive it?" asked Daisy. "IT hope so," said Fred. So the "dreadful motor-car" they were afterwards to give the affectionate nickname of Feeney, bore the couple home. Daisy was not to know her husband had driven it just twice before. That news was kept from her till the initial fright had subsided. "For motoring we ladies wore wide hat$™tied on with tulle," says Aunt Daisy. "I'd climb up beside Fred and he’d drive down the street waving to his pals from the club standing at the kerb yelling, ‘Here comes Bash!’ Oh, ho! That was a wild one! Oh, he was glorious, was Dad!" The clubmen. gathered round, too, during Fred Basham’s bouts of what he called poor-man’s gout. "They would stand round his bed and grin because he couldn’t have any whisky," says Aunt Daisy. "But I used to love it when he had gout. He was as good as gold when he was ill, and I could have him at home and do anything I liked for him." In the streams around Hawera Fred Basham used to fish, sometimes taking with him his diminutive young wife, and carrying her pick-a-back across the creeks. "But mostly he lived his own life,’ she says, "and let me live mine. Except, of course, that he didn’t like me going on with music. He liked music

in moderation. I liked it in immoderation! Dad used to say, ‘Oh, get Leo to take you.’ Leo was my accompanist-~ Leo Whittaker — he’s still playing in Auckland. Leo was young in those days, of course, and he was very pleased to take me everywhere." T Hawera and later in Eltham, Waipukurau and the Hauraki Plains, Daisy took pupils for music and sing- | ing. And she performed at concerts in and out of those towns. The programme for Wellington Choral Union’s Messiah of Christmas Night, 1918, lists the contralto Miss Daisy Basham, of Waipukurau, as one of the four guest soloists. The performance was conducted by Robert Parker, one of the country’s most renowned musicians of that time. The Bashams moved after the birth of their first child to-Eltham, where Daisy bore her next two children, Geoffrey and Barbara, while her husband, as County Engineer, built the country’s first strip of tar-sealed road. The two new babies were little trouble to the now experienced young mother. Truby

King’s methods were more widely known, but Daisy felt she could modify them as she thought fit. She recalls that her son Geoffrey, then four years old, was asked by a neighbour, a Plunket en» thusiast, whether. his baby sister Barbara was fed by formula. Young Geoffrey considered the matter solemnly for a moment, then declared, "Sometimes she has the formula, and sometimes she has Mrs Basham." In these years Daisy Basham acquired something of the poise and bearing necessary to please a large audience. At home she had been forced out from under the sheltering umbrella of Victorian authority and restraint. She developed the assurance that was to serve her well in the hectic, disorganised, ad libbing early days of radio. When she thought back to her London childhood it was to render thanks that her mother had not married the German fiance she remembered. One morning she opened the paper to find the headline: "EUROPE ABLAZE!" The Kaiser had decided to go to war. (To be continued)