by Jack Lasenby
puku Belly.
quid One pound in the old money.
R.C. Roman Catholic.
ran-tan A drinking bout.
Redskins What we now call American Indians.
ricrac Zigzag braid used as trimming on clothes.
rimu A large New Zealand tree.
“Salt, mustard, vinegar, pepper!” Faster and faster skipping.
score Twenty.
scow A squarish, flat-bottomed sailing boat.
Scowegian Sailors’ slang for a Scandinavian.
scrubbing board A board of ribbed wood or glass for rubbing and scrubbing clothes clean.
shanghai Catapult, slingshot.
shilling An old silver coin worth twelve pennies, four threepences, or two sixpences.
sickle bar The bar supporting the cutting blade of a hay mower.
sixpence An old silver coin worth six pennies.
skim dick Skim milk left after the cream is separated.
slack Poor, powdery coal, useful for keeping the fire burning slowly.
smoko Morning and afternoon tea.
snarler Sausage.
Soldiers’ Settlement A group of farms settled by soldiers after the Great War, 1914-18.
splitting-gun A steel pipe drilled with holes. It was driven into logs and stumps, filled with blasting powder, and set off, splitting them.
standard two The Year Four class.
stock Farm animals.
stone-picking Clearing fields of stones by hand.
sugarbag Sugar used to come in seventy-pound sacks—about thirty-two kilograms. The bags were useful containers in the 1930s, and were often made into pikaus.
swingle-tree A pivoted bar connecting the traces from the horse’s collar to the load. The pivot stops the collar pulling on one side and hurting the horse’s shoulder.
tank-stand Many houses collected rainwater in tanks. The stand beneath them was often closed in for a shed.
tetchy Bad-tempered.
The First and Second Jungle Books. Marvellous books by Rudyard Kipling. Ask your mother or father or teacher to read them to you. Don’t watch the DVDs unless you want to turn your brains to mush.
“The Supplement” A separate part of the Saturday New Zealand Herald, with cartoons and light entertainment.
threepence An old silver coin worth three pennies.
traces Straps or chains from the horse’s collar to the load.
Treasure Island A wonderful book by Robert Louis Stevenson, much more fun to read than watching the DVD.
“Twelve Dancing Princesses, The” One of the greatest fairy stories. Read it!
wether A castrated ram.
white pine Kahikatea, a tall New Zealand tree with white wood that has no smell, so was used to make butter-boxes.
white-eye, wax-eye, silver-eye A small New Zealand bird.
whizz, a Somebody who’s very good at doing something.
Wow A name for the old Auckland mental or psychiatric hospital which was in the Whau Creek district, now Avondale. Whau was often pronounced Wow, and the hospital became known as “the Wow”.
“Young Lochinvar” A poem by Sir Walter Scott.
Acknowledgement
I am grateful for the assistance of Creative New Zealand—the Arts Council of New Zealand. Their grant in 2007 helped me complete work on this book.
Copyright
HarperCollinsPublishers
First published in 2010
This edition published in 2010
by HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1, Auckland 1140
Copyright © Jack Lasenby 2010
Jack Lasenby asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers.
National Library of New Zealand Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Lasenby, Jack.
The haystack / Jack Lasenby.
ISBN 978 1 8695 0852 4 (pbk.)
ISBN 978 0 7304 4608 8 (epub)
[1. Friendship—Fiction. 2. Depressions—1929—Fiction.
3. Waharoa (N.Z.)—Fiction] I. Title.
NZ823.2—dc 22
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