When I left it was midday, and I had already been working or busy about the farm for seven hours. I tried to get trains across country to north Devon. I suppose that I should have taken a train to London, and then another one from there to North Devon, but I did not think of this, and no one suggested it. By midnight I had reached Burton-on-Trent, and was pacing up and down the platform nursing my wrist, which had been bitten by a dog of de Ville's during all the fracas. There was a rabies scare at the time and when my wrist began to throb I got frightened. I made inquiries, and was directed to a doctor's house in Burton. I rang the bell but could not make anyone hear. Then I saw a chink of light from a curtained window, and peeped through to see a number of people sitting round a roulette table. I knocked on the window, and they all jumped up and dispersed like a covey of frightened partridges. The doctor came to the door, and very sedately attended to my wrist, dressed it, and said that he thought it would be all right. He sent me away without charging me anything. When I got back to the station, I was immediately grabbed by two plain-clothes detectives who asked me where I had been. It flashed through my mind that they knew the doctor was running a gambling establishment (then strictly illegal), and wanted me to give evidence against him. Having been befriended by the doctor, I refused to say where I had been or why. At last I convinced them that I was only a passenger to Devon and then they told me that there had been some thefts at the station, and that they thought that I was one of the thieves. About dawn I was approaching Exeter where I had to change trains. Unable to keep awake any longer I slept through Exeter and had to work my way back from Cornwall. I did not get home until 2 o'clock in the afternoon. By that time I was tired, and perhaps not as diplomatic as I ought to have been when my father was furious at my turning up suddenly without notice. There was decidedly no fatted calf awaiting a returning prodigal.
I tried to get a job in a garage. I bicycled to Exeter and back one day (90 miles) and interviewed six garage owners, but without success. A few weeks later my father obtained a passage for me in the steerage of a ship going to New Zealand. My brother insisted on travelling down in the train to Plymouth with me to see me off, but he had just deeply offended me by laughing at my wish to have a revolver to take with me to New Zealand. This spoilt the start of the voyage for me. Looking back, I think that I may not have been fair to my father. I have been told that he was ordered by my grandfather to enter the Church on the old principle of one son each for the Army, the Navy and the Church, but my father himself told me that he had wanted to enter the Church. I think, however, that he was unsuited for it, and that if he had been in some other profession, he would have made his mark. He was continually fighting against his possibly unconscious wishes and using up his nervous energy in a tremendous effort to do the right thing. In the end he became a puritan of the severest kind. One day he reprimanded one of the villagers for being drunk, and this man retorted that it was all very well for the likes of him to talk, because he could keep drink in his house, and have it at any time, whereas a poor man could not afford to do so. The logic of this seems a bit shaky, but it impressed my father so much that he never drank alcohol again, except in the sacramental wine.
In the house he seemed to be disapproving of everything I did, and waiting to squash any enthusiasm. Occasionally he was friendly, and on a bicycle ride or a walk he could be a wonderfully good companion. My happiest memory of him is of one day when we were out for a walk together and he wanted to hold me by the ankles over the side of a bridge so that I could take an egg from a water wagtail's nest. I wouldn't let him, and I still remember with regret the whimsical look of disappointment on his face. Building up his collection of birds' eggs was one of his great hobbies. At that moment he was a fellow human being for me.
CHAPTER 4
NEW ZEALAND
The Bremen, a German ship captured during the war, was lying in Plymouth Sound when I joined her. The steerage quarters were pretty rough, with bunks rigged up in every inch of space. The food was poor to start with, and the cooking made it worse. But I was eighteen, and off on my own to New Zealand. My father had given me £10 in sovereigns and because of the deep distrust of my fellows, inculcated in me during my religion-dominated upbringing, I always kept this gold against my belly in a leather money belt. It was December; we had the expected rough weather crossing the Bay of Biscay, and I went through the normal agonies of seasickness. After this, the romance of the voyage took charge and I would stand in the bows at night, with the quiet roar of the bow wave in my ears, and watch the stars weaving to and fro above the mast. The deck throbbed, and the rigging shook at the end of each roll, but it was quiet for an instant before the ship started each roll back. The steerage passengers were an odd collection. The English ones nearly all seemed to have quirks of behaviour, or queer ideas of some sort; the New Zealanders were more balanced and practical. I think the one I liked best was a New Zealand blacksmith going home. One night a boxing match was arranged, and my opponent was a tall, broad-shouldered man with an exceptionally long reach. It was difficult to get inside his long guard, but the fact that I was getting into rather a mess, with a lot of blood over me, was not a proper indication of the state of the fight. I had not yet got his measure, and was most disappointed when the referee stopped the fight. I mention this boxing match because I think it had an important effect later in the voyage. We reached Durban for Hogmanay, and the coal trimmers' shovels beat a terrific din over the still harbour at midnight. I swam in the surf behind shark-proof iron railings. There was a fresh breeze driving the spray off the combers in sheets, and the sea was so salty it stung my nostrils. The hot burning sun was a novelty. We drove about in rickshaws, and everything seemed romantic and exciting.
The chief trimmer on one watch had been my second in the boxing match, and when he was brought back to the ship handcuffed I talked the native policeman into freeing him and letting me take him aboard. He had been drunk, of course. Next day he deserted and therefore the watch was one man short. I volunteered to sign on, and was duly accredited a member of my first trade union, the Firemen's Union. My six mates of the watch were a tough lot. They were London-Irish. I was told that the Liverpool-Irish trimmers were the toughest in the world, but it was hard to believe that they were any tougher than these London-Irish were. Most of them had been torpedoed at least once, and one man described how the engineer had stood at the top of the gangway with a revolver threatening to shoot anyone who left his post after the torpedo had struck the ship in the side. The Bremen had hot stokeholds; particularly one double hold with a row of furnaces both fore and aft. When shifting clinkers in this hold I had furnace heat from both sides. I was soon exhausted and felt at the end of my tether. But we were short-handed, and in stormy seas after leaving Durban we were on watch ten hours a day – four hours on, eight off, followed by six hours on and six off. After each watch time was needed to wash our bodies grimed with coal black; also we had to eat. Although the food seemed plentiful after the severe English rationing, we were always ravenous. Looking back, I think that again this was probably due to lack of some vitamins in the diet.
Nearly every day there were fights over the food, sometimes with knives drawn. I never had a fight, and I attribute this to the boxing match early in the voyage that had been keenly watched by both trimmers and stokers. Besides the crew wanting as big a share as possible of any food going, there were also the cockroaches and weevils. I tried various dodges to keep the cockroaches off the plate and mug in my locker. My best catch from one biscuit was three weevils and two maggots. I was not the only person exhausted. In the watch after ours, a big Swedish trimmer said that he could not go on watch. There had to be a full complement below and one of our watch had to take his trick for him. A second time one of our trimmers did his trick for him, but when he declared a third time that he was unfit to work, our watch was not having any more of it. They dragged him out of his bunk, and beat him up with their fists. They seized him by his legs, and dragged him alo
ng the alleyway to dump him down the ash chute into the hold. These chutes were shafts, just big enough to haul up a sack of ashes from the stokehold for dumping over the side of the ship. The man looked a ghastly sight being dragged along with his head bumping on the steel floor, and his face covered in blood. I had a feeling of shame that I did not come to his rescue, but I knew that if I intervened they would tell me to do his trick for him myself, and I was at the end of my endurance. Perhaps my mates were better psychologists than I was; the Swede suddenly jumped to his feet and, thrusting his attackers aside, ran down to the hold. I was told later that he worked harder than anybody else on his watch.
Years later, when I was on a passage from Kobe to London in a P&O steamer after I had crashed in Japan in my seaplane, one of the engineers there turned out to have been seventh engineer in the Bremen. He told me the subsequent history of my trimmer watch. Of the seven who started the voyage, only three got back to England. One had deserted in Durban; one disappeared in very suspicious circumstances on the passage between New Zealand and Australia; one had been killed by a blow on the head from one of the long clinker slicing bars; and a fourth had been hanged for murder.
I got my discharge in Wellington, New Zealand, and drew £9 in wages for the three weeks' work. My ticket was endorsed 'Very good' for sobriety and two other virtues.
Ned Holmes, my New Zealand soldier friend, got me a job at ten shillings a week with the manager of a farm outside Masterton, belonging to his father. Old Maxwell, the manager, was a big chubbycheeked man, with a bushy moustache, and was considered a great man with sheep. I lived with the family, which consisted of Maxwell, his wife, and their daughter, a sweet little thing of about seventeen, called Olive, whose name somehow exactly fitted her face.
Old Maxwell gave me the sack after three weeks; he said that with my bad sight I would not be able to spot the ewes when they were cast on their backs in the spring, when heavy with lamb, and unable to get up unaided. As a matter of fact, my visual accuracy with spectacles is not too bad; for instance I once shot two hares with two shots of a .22 rifle, the first was 145 yards off and the second, which bobbed up when it heard the shot, 95 yards away. Also, I shot five rabbits on the run one morning with a rifle, so I was not sure about Maxwell's reason for getting rid of me.
I got a new job on a sheep station 38 miles from Masterton. There was no town or township (village) nearer than Masterton, and there were just two of us to look after a farm of 2,000 acres, with 3,000 sheep and about 200 head of cattle. I was in the saddle most of the day, riding round the hills attending to the sheep. When we were mustering a paddock, of which there were three, we would start off from the station house by moonlight at three in the morning. We worked the sheep steadily off the hilltops and down to the bottom of the paddock, where the dogs would keep them cornered while we inspected them. There were pens for drafting or sorting them.
Except for the shearing, the two of us, Arthur the boss and I the roustabout, did all the work on the station; dagging, which was shearing back legs and tails with hand shears, dipping, ear-marking and cutting the ram lambs to turn them into wethers. It was the custom for shepherds to toast the lamb's testicles over a fire and eat them, but this was not for me. It was, however, my job as undershepherd to kill and dress the hoggets that we ate. I shall never forget how my knees trembled when I killed my first sheep and the blood spurted out in beats as I cut its throat. I think that few mature people would eat beef or lamb if they had to kill the animals first.
Arthur, my boss, was an excellent shepherd, and could work his dogs easily a mile away. Two thousand acres is a sizeable slice of country – three square miles – but the surface area is more in that part of New Zealand because, being geologically a young country, the hills are steep. The ground we were on was blue papa (volcanic mud), and the storm streams cut steep gullies out of it. Along the banks of the creeks grew clumps of lawyer vine, a kind of bramble but with hooked thorns of a vicious kind.
We did all our own cooking, and Arthur baked the bread. I tried one baking, but it was too hard to eat. Every other Sunday it was my turn to wash the kitchen floor. Arthur was a tidy man and washed up after every meal. Once he was supposed to be away on holiday, but couldn't bear to be parted from the farm, and came back before he was due. I remember the look of disapproval on his face when I came in to find him washing up an accumulation of six days' dirty dishes that I had piled up in his absence.
I loved the riding. One day I rode 45 miles to a dance and home again next day. Arthur was annoyed and said it was not fair on a horse out at grass. Perhaps not if I had ridden at a canter as the New Zealanders did, but 45 miles is not too far for a horse trotting in English style.
Nothing can be more stupid and obstinate than a sheep, and sometimes I found trying to move 500 stupid, obstinate, glassy-eyed sheep hard to bear. Once I was sent out with a packhorse to a neighbouring sheep station to skin some dead sheep, and bring them back for dog food (the sheep carcasses were hung in trees out of reach of the dogs, which didn't seem to mind about the maggots). While being driven across country, the leading sheep of a mob had jumped down across a small stream below the track and landed on its knees. Before it got up, the sheep behind jumped on top of it. The sheep went on jumping until there were 500 piled up dead.
There came a time when I asked for a rise from fifteen to twenty-five shillings a week. The visiting owner had a long discussion with Arthur about this, and then came over and offered me twenty shillings a week. This was not my style and I walked off the farm. I went to visit my blacksmith friend whom I had met on the Bremen, and he got me a job on a farm near Taihape at £2 10s a week. They asked me if I could milk, and I said 'no'. This was untrue, I had milked fifteen cows day and night while looking after de Ville's farm when he was away, but I hated the smell of milk, it rotted my boots, and I had no desire to be a milkman. I used to lie in my bunk in the morning listening to the other chaps getting the cows in; I started work the easy way at 8 o'clock.
This farm belonged to three brothers called Williams, and their brother-in-law. Two of the Williams brothers and I totalled twelve feet round the chest, me being the smallest with forty inches. They were powerful men, and magnificent horsemen. We had eighty horses on the place, and used to break them in periodically. Sunday morning's amusement was to put me on one and see how long it took before I was thrown. Once, the bucking bust the saddle girth and I shot through the air in a great arc with the saddle still between my legs.
This farmland had not long been reclaimed from virgin bush. It had been felled, and a year later burnt. Trunks of two to three feet in diameter had survived the fire and still lay on the ground, unburnt. We used to muster cattle at full gallop round the steep sides of the hills, taking the logs as we went. I have seldom been more scared, but it was exciting.
There was a sawmill on the farm, and I used to work there for weeks at a time. I had a fine job, 'fiddling', which meant working away by myself with a seven-foot cross-cut saw, slicing the trees into twelve or fourteen-foot lengths so that they could be handled and moved up to the sawbench. On spring mornings I was bursting with vitality and fitness. The grass, as we rode down to the mill, would be glittering with dew, the sun shining, the tuis and bell birds singing their endless, bell-like notes. There was the smell from sawdust and the burning bark slabs fed to the engine that drove the saw. Our smallest meal of the day, breakfast, usually consisted of a large plate (really large) of porridge, with plenty of milk and sugar, followed by a pound steak with three eggs on it, followed by two full rounds cut from a big loaf of bread, with plenty of butter and jam.
Another interesting job was shearing. After some practice, I was able to shear at the rate of seventy-five sheep a day. It was hard work, and I had to tie a handkerchief round my forehead to keep the sweat from running on to my spectacles, where it left a deposit of salt and spoilt my vision. My seventy-five sheep a day was a paltry quantity compared with what the experts could do – the Australian cha
mpion had shorn over 400 sheep in a day, using blade shears. The shearing machine, like the clipper used by a barber at the back of your neck, but engine driven, required a good deal of manual dexterity. I wonder if I could shear a big ram successfully today? Here's how: first, sit him on his tail and shear back forelocks and cheeks to the back of his head. Holding him between your knees, push the cutters down his chest, and then split the fleece open down to his tummy. Next sheer his forelegs to the shoulder, and his hind legs to the rump. Take care! Don't forget he is a valuable ram. Then, over on to his side, with his neck against one leg and his tail against the other, and use long sweeping strokes from rump to neck until all that side is shorn. This is the most awkward position for control when he struggles. Over on to the other side, and repeat the last process, and there is the fleece lying on the floor. A boy would pick up the fleece, fold it carefully and take it to the sorting table, where he would spread it out. On our farm there were only four machines at work, but on a big station with twenty shearers the activity was prodigious. After the day's work, our chaps used to pop into the big round tank of warm water used to cool the shearing engine.
The Lonely Sea and the Sky Page 4
