Dear Oliver

by Peter Wells

  I believe Nancy is wearing the clothing of an officer’s lady in this photograph. The lady may have travelled on from Napier to somewhere else. Or she may have tired of the fashion, or it had gone out of style. But this woman has handed down, in my theory, a complete and rather magnificent set of borrowed plumes for Nancy Northe to wear on a very special day — a visit to the photographic studio in Napier in 1864.

  We know the date of the photograph because her last child is sitting on her lap. This is Emily, who was to die of diphtheria on 23 October 1875, aged eleven years, nine months. Diphtheria, associated with overcrowding and substandard living conditions, was brought to Napier by a ship and spread about the town with startling speed. The year 1875 was a very bad one for Nancy Northe anyway. Her husband, who had been ill for some years, died; then her adult daughter Maria died in childbirth, and she lost her two youngest children, Josiah, aged eighteen, and Emily to diphtheria. As the former missionary and Napier resident William Colenso commented on 2 May 1876 in a letter to an acquaintance ‘Two more of the Northes [dead, they are an] unfortunate family.’12

  Nancy Northe lived for another fifteen years, and died in July 1890 from cancer. Colenso, writing again to his typographer friend Coupland Harding and casting around for something to pad out a letter, noted in passing an event in the life of the small town — the death of ‘old Mrs Northe’.13

  It is not much to say about someone’s life — she had died. The dramas of her life went unexpressed, as they did for most colonial women, doubly so because she was illiterate. The novelist Hilary Mantel has commented, in relation to her own great-grandmother, ‘I suppose that when a woman had 10 children, she ceases to have a biography.’14 What she means here, I think, is that the ceaseless production, weaning, educating, dressing, washing, reprimanding, loving, feeding — let alone the physical effort and mess of cyclical births — deleted or washed away or wore down whatever was individual within the person: the mothering to a degree consumed the human.

  Those two slim family stories offer some sense of the poles of Nancy’s personality: the young woman who could control a bolting horse (whether true or apocryphal, it must have somehow suited her personality) and the old bint using the blade of her deformed nail to pinch her children so that they sat stock still and silent. As to what lay between — silence.

  THIS BRINGS US TO SERGEANT John Northe, who has threaded through this story elusively. It appears it was he who wrote the four letters discussed below. But first a word about handwriting. Learning to handwrite was once considered one of the building blocks of growing up. You learnt to handwrite on your way to learning how to express yourself in words. You began with written words as a sculptor begins with a block of wood or marble. But first you had to learn how to form those strange symbols called letters, each one meaning something different. (The relationship of a letter to ‘the letter’ is obvious and direct.)

  I was educated in the middle 1950s, and I have a vivid recall of the arduous steps through which you learnt to hold a pen. It was not at all easy. First of all there was a long and seemingly endless exercise in which you drew a continuous circle over and over on large sheets of cheap ‘butcher’s paper’, so your fingers learnt to form the shapes that were letters. You used either crayon or pencil to do this. You did this for so long your fingers ached. New muscles were being educated: just as in the gym, a lot of exercise goes into defining a new muscle.

  My first pen was a dip-in pen, an item dating back to the quill (a moulted flight feather of a bird, its rib sharpened to a point) of the sixteenth century. By 1956, when I was six years old, my pen was large, plastic and blue, with a stick-in nib; our school desks were furnished with an inkwell in the top right-hand corner, into which you dipped the nib. I had started using ink, a compound made of carbon black as well as waxes. This was an exciting development, a step away from the painfully inarticulate state of infancy.

  But progress was extremely slow — the nib had a propensity to catch on paper and splatter ink everywhere. ‘You had blotted your copybook’, made a mess of things, a saying that also applied to how you conducted your life. It took a long time to control your fingers, to get muscle fluency.

  By the 1950s handwriting was regarded as an essential life-tool. Letters were not only the means by which people corresponded with banks, employers, insurance companies and so on, but also those strange beasts — love letters. Words were everywhere and everything, and to be incapable of handwriting was to be severely disadvantaged.

  Everybody had a unique signature. This was as individual as a thumbprint and served the same purpose: to individualise and warrant that you were the particular individual carrying that name and hence sending a letter. During adolescence, it was not unusual to spend many delightful hours modelling different ways of signing your name. This was akin to trying on different personalities. It took a while for a signature to gel with your sense of self. A signature was utterly unique to you and it was meant to message the kind of person you were (modest or showy, stylish or shy). You also tried to have a few quirks or flourishes in your signature to make it difficult to reproduce.

  My ancestor, John Northe, had handwriting that is pure copybook, almost arduously formed, very correct and legible. But his spelling was erratic. When it got to the ‘correct costume’ of words, he showed great uncertainty — almost, I would say, a form of fright. That is because highly literate people were frightening to the marginally illiterate, much in the way a native French speaker is fearsome to an English person mumbling out uncertain French. There is a sense of a reprimand in the glance.

  Written language has traditionally been the right of the property-owning classes; it was their own code, if you will. It reproved outsiders by requiring them to reproduce the correct use of spelling and language. It was a kind of fundamental test. Fiction writers have always been able to evade this scrutiny by using language in an imaginative way. But for most people, hesitant about entering the brightly lit room of an empty page, this scrutiny was so offputting their spelling went to pieces, their knowledge of grammar tripped them up, and they felt they were making fools of themselves in public. So writing has always been a form of coded social control. John Northe’s faltering letters with their uncertain grammar are interesting because, like those of Charles Days, they come from a section of society from whom, historically, we rarely hear.

  His sister Elizabeth had said, axiomatically, when Sergeant Northe departed for New Zealand in 1848, ‘it does not matter where we are so long as we can live and do well’. On 19 June 1871, in carefully shaped, evenly spaced copperplate handwriting, he seemed to echo the same sentiments when he wrote to his daughter Eleanor and son-in-law Samuel Evinson (an ex-colour sergeant, so more marrying in) in far-away Gisborne, ‘I have got all the Boys about me now. I have given them all a good Trade which is as good as a little fortune to them with care. William, I am glad to say … have got a nice little place of his own; Robert as [sic] got a piece ground near William and his [sic] putting up a 4 room cottage on it, Frederick I make no doubt as soon as he get out of his time … is making great progress in the Saddling Trade. Josiah we can’t say much about as yet, I have bound him to a first rate Master Builder named Renouf for 4 years and he is to have 12/- per week first year, 15/- 2nd year and 20/- 3rd year and 30/- 4th. He is the makings of a big man, please God give him his health.’ (As we have just seen, Josiah was soon to be cut down by diphtheria.) ‘John [John James], he has a first rate trade but as far as I can learn he has had some good chances and have let them slip. He is jobbing about now with one Chas. Day.’

  Sergeant Northe, patriarch, had shaped his sons’ futures. He had not come so far without hoping the next generation would do better. He had set his sons up with potentially ‘little fortunes’ if they tended their work with care. He has apprenticed them to various trades — carpenter, printer, saddler, builder, shipwright — and he spoke as the patriarch who has given them these chances. His daughter Dolly ‘keep herself pretty buisy at
her Sewing Machine. When not at home she is at Mr Newton’s Store working at his Machine — 3/- per diem.’ His son John (James) was also ‘talking about taking down [the Stable] and take it to the Spit to make a Work Shop of it’ — the beginning of John James Northey’s flourishing shipwright business on Westshore. All is activity and bustling enterprise in 1871, the start of the post-land war boom.

  The letters illuminate the urge of all migrants: to improve their living conditions generation by generation in order to escape the constriction and horrors of poverty. At seventy-two, Sergeant Northe must have been proud that he had worked most of his life for one shilling a day and his youngest son aged fourteen was already earning just under double that, while his daughter Dolly earned three times this amount.

  These letters display their author’s pride in earning good money, potentially leading to the acquisition of capital — the one thing that allows for self-reliance and empowerment and independence in a free-market economy which has no ‘protective net’ to catch those who fall by the wayside. There’s nothing unusual in this, and in its own way it’s to be highly commended. It is a classic migrant strategy. It is one thing to set off into the unknown with the safety belt of capital. How much more risky to set off into an unknown world with only your labour, wits and street-smarts to guide you.

  BUT HOLD ON. Sergeant Northe was not on his own. He travelled in the caravan of the imperial army to Napier via Auckland, Russell and, before that, New South Wales, Nova Scotia, Corfu. He was one tiny cog in a global empire. He was not an entrepreneur; he was an administrator of sorts within a vast bureaucratic unit. (As late at 1868 he was issuing notices which appeared in the local paper about the sale of unwanted barrack bedding.) The very paper on which these letters were written makes this clear.

  Each letter was written on pale blue notepaper headed by the royal coat of arms. The paper is glazed and was probably purloined by Sergeant Northe, who might have regarded it as one of the perks of the job. The coat of arms, however, awards a kind of unwitting grandiosity to the letters’ simple, semi-literate utterances. It also points to an adherence to the pieties of monarchy and a belief in a deferential and hierarchical social order (even if in one of the letters he is cynical about some of the men higher up the pecking order than himself). While he is writing, in his imagination he is the king and he is surrounded by magic beasts like unicorns and roaring lions.

  By this time he had been in the army for more than forty years. One could almost say he was institutionalised, and his writing has an earnest sort of look, one that normally goes with a tongue tucked by the front lip as the forehead frowns with the effort of guiding a pen. A photograph of Sergeant John Northe shows his workman’s hands — miner’s hands indeed, used to force, to carry, perhaps even to punch. A pen to him is as awkward and unnatural as a ruff or a feather on a velvet cap.

  John Northe had joined the British Army at Plymouth on 3 May 1820 as a private in the Royal Staff Corps, and 188 days later he became a corporal. He was twenty-one and he showed promise. The Royal Staff Corps was in charge of short-term engineering works (road and canal building), and it is possible that his former life as a miner gave him an advantage. The Royal Staff Corps answered to the Quartermaster General, who was in charge of supplies for the army: this was a shadowplay for John Northe’s future.

  Life within the army, however, was brutal and demanding. Flogging was common (even though slaves could no longer be flogged) and all the men lived communally. They were paid a shilling a day — the ‘King’s Shilling’ — but more than a third was taken out to pay for food: three-quarters of a pound (340 grams) of boiled meat a day and one pound (453 grams) of bread. The attraction of this in times of starvation is obvious. The men had to look after their own uniforms, and keep them washed and clean.

  He was a corporal for six long years, then became a sergeant on Christmas Day 1826 — surely a day of celebration. He remained a sergeant for eleven years and twenty-nine days. In one sense he could go no further. It wasn’t until the disasters of the Crimean War of 1853 revealed the idiocy of an officer class based on the simple purchase of commissions that this changed. Up until then, no matter how good you were as a soldier, you always remained ‘non-commissioned’ unless you paid to become an officer. You could not escape your class. Even so, within these stultifying parameters Sergeant Northe had done well: by 29 January 1834 he wrote to his cousins, as we have seen, that he had returned to England from Halifax in Nova Scotia and ‘all our company’ was discharged ‘a few days afterwards except myself who they would not part with’.

  He had scored for himself what amounted to a cushy office job. ‘My duty at this present time is very easy and dear cousins I am happy to inform you I am very comfortable.’ Which was as well as ‘everything is very dull about England at this time and no likelihood of it getting better’. (The year 1834 was marked by the passing of the savage new Poor Law. This created the workhouse, a place so horrible that only the truly destitute could face entering it. The legislation led to widespread social unrest. During the Chartist riots of 1839–1848, workhouses were often singled out for attack and burnt to the ground.)

  This also gives some context to the degree to which John Northe was ‘very comfortable’. His new desk job ‘answers my purpose well for as I have now 14 years service and if I live to stay 7 years more I shall then be entitled to 1/10d pension’. This amounted to a beggar’s banquet of 10 shillings a week. Nevertheless it was substantially more than a labourer’s wage.

  He was discharged by the Quartermaster General on 5 February 1838 with praise, and forwarded to the Barracks Department in New South Wales. More travelling. ‘Sergeant John Northe’s conduct as a soldier has been Sober and trustworthy, an intelligent Non Commissioned Officer and in every respect a good and deserving soldier.’

  A month after his discharge, on 14 March 1838, he was admitted as a Chelsea Hospital Out-Pensioner, which gave him a very small pension of ninepence a day, which was raised to two shillings and one pence in 1870. (A Chelsea Hospital Out-Pensioner was an honorific pension for a long-serving ‘other rank’ soldier who was overseas.) But he continued to be employed by the army until at least 1868, by which time he was sixty-nine years old. It is unclear when he retired.

  He had arrived in Napier in February 1858 as a barrack sergeant, loosely attached to the 65th Regiment. A barrack sergeant position was traditionally a reward for a soldier who had been in the service for a long time, who was capable and responsible. His domain, as he aged, was an indoor and administrative one, a reward for a lifetime of conscientious service and — in a world in which alcoholism was endemic — sobriety. However, his position seems to have had a degree of ambiguity about it. His daughter Eleanor described him as a ‘paymaster sergeant for the 65th Regiment’, while his death notice in Auckland’s Southern Cross newspaper elevated him to a ‘Barrack Master’.15 He is not listed in the records of the 65th Regiment soldiers who stayed in New Zealand.

  It is hard to get a sense of the human within this straitjacketed existence. He was moved like a piece of human chess around the globe wherever British power needed to assert itself or protect British interests. He arrived in Napier as two powerful iwi were about to fight one another and the few Pākehā in the region panicked. Yet outside this confined context we can still get a more supple sense of the man whose aspirations reached beyond his ability, or inability, to write grammatically correct English.

  NOWHERE MORE IS THIS SO than in his enthusiasm for and active participation in the Oddfellows Manchester Unity. The Oddfellows was a ‘friendly society’, a non-profit mutual society owned by its members. In its own way it was a form of health and employment insurance for working men, arranged on a democratic principle (not unlike, in fact, the Cornish mines). It deployed, however, the mystical iconography of magic, monarchy and the Freemasons. There were costumes, signs, passwords, grips, oaths of secrecy and ceremonies. Various honorary certificates, medals and inscriptions were given to PNG (Past No
bel Grand) John Northe, who was an active and enthusiastic member. These were carefully kept and handed down by the family. (A walking stick, his medals from the Oddfellows, two framed commendations, his Oddfellow seal, all the official documents from the army, his discharge papers, his silver watch: by these few things we know him.)

  In my grandmother’s sitting room hung a heavily framed silk certificate dated 29 November 1847, and given to PNG John Northe when he left the Loyal Kinkora Lodge, No. 4195, in Bathurst. He was a ‘worthy and respected Member, a zealous and efficient supporter … your character appears to us equally admirable and we hope your example … Will create a spirit of emulation …’ He would find fellow brothers ‘wherever the sun rises on the Empire’. From Halifax in Canada, a medal reads: ‘A mark of respect to Past Secretary J. Northe for introducing 11 Members in 4 succeeding Lodge Nights 1831’. He had initiative, enterprise and, it would seem, a degree of charisma.

  Perhaps we see him at his most complete when he did what he had never been able to do before: buy land.16 In Napier he decided he would put down roots. On 5 February 1858, within days of the troops arriving in Napier, he bought a large plot (W119) in the Napier Hill Cemetery. The very size of this plot — essentially three berths wide — was an expression of patriarchal intent: its purchase declared ‘Here will lie my family, in all its glory and multitudinous; here will lie my bones and hereafter the bones of all my family’. The purchase so soon after arriving in the town also reveals a sense of relief that he was, at long last, no longer being shuttled around. He was fifty-nine years old, a father of grown men and young women. He would not die for another seventeen years. But by getting in so early, the partially literate barrack sergeant ended up surrounded in death by the town’s wealthy and those who considered themselves a cut above him as colonial gentry.