Cats we have had: Nui and Iti 2001 - 2009

When Maui and Rua died we realised we could not immediately get any more cats but would have to wait several months.  This was because we were both commuting to London and would not be around to feed them several times a day as kittens.  Also the week that Rua died I was told I was being made redundant.  This was because of general budgetary cuts but I had already decided that four hours a day commuting was too much after having been ill.  I was given several months’ notice of my redundancy which was to include ‘gardening leave’, i.e. some time when I was paid but did not have to work.  This meant we could settle the kittens during that time.   Of course I still needed to work and I did apply for a couple of full-time jobs but given I had had cancer and was 55 I decided it would be better to ‘retire’, take my pension and then freelance.  Because it was a redundancy I did not have any actuarial reduction to the pension but giving up the full-time job meant that I was ten years short of pension contributions.  I told myself that as I had not had any time off for motherhood, I would be in much the same position as virtually everyone I knew.  In the seventies everyone had had to stop work when they had children, had usually had a gap of several years and often a lot of part-time work before they got back into full-time employment.   It is all very different for the next generation.

It was now 2001.  We decided to get two more Siamese in the summer but had to find a breeder.  We bought various cat magazines and in the end found someone about an hour’s drive away.  This was much better than the previous occasion.  We were able to go and visit the kittens before we took them and chose the only boy in the litter and a seal point girl.  She was very tiny and I later learnt that seal points are generally the smallest in the litter.  The boy was the biggest kitten and was blonde.  

We were told he was a seal point tabby but this was not true.  He was a blue point (like his mother) tabby but he stayed very pale and never got really dark points.  Of our seven cats he was the only one who was not seal point.  Then we had to choose Maori names.  We opted for Nui for the boy and Iti for the girl.  We learnt that Nui meant ‘big’ and Iti meant ‘small’ so when they were fully grown we realised we had chosen well.   Iti appeared to have a slight eye infection when we went to collect them but we decided to risk it.  She recovered but only lived until she was eight so it is possible that there were long-term effects from this infection.

They adjusted to life in a Northamptonshire village well and by our standards were lucky to have me at home some days, although I still did work in London so there were days when they were on their own for extended hours.  We trained them onto leads which meant they could not ‘escape’.  This was important as we had no gate and although we lived on a dead-end lane it was quite busy.   We also used to play with them in the garden after dinner in the summer.  The house was built right alongside the lane so the garden was all at the back.  They used to love this summer playtime as we had a lot of cosmos and they could chase the flowers in the dusk.  We did have the usual adventures.  On one occasion we had let them into the garden on their leads on a Sunday morning.   I suddenly saw that Nui was foaming at the mouth!  It turned out that a frog had got into the border and he had found it among the flowers. 

The far end of the garden gave onto fields as did one side of it.  Nui was not averse to getting through the fence and wandering around among our neighbour’s chickens and pheasants, not to mention the cows he kept there.  We learnt that male cats will wander but not females as Iti never did this.   The first summer, we had visitors and one evening forgot to shut all the windows on the garden side.  Nui wandered off during the evening and we had great problems waiting for him to return, not least because if one cat is inside you want to shut them in but cannot easily do this without shutting the other cat out.

Because they were on leads we thought about taking them for walks.  Iti had no interest but I used to take Nui along the lane to where there was a path up to a field.  He enjoyed exploring in there but there was always the risk of another cat appearing.  The neighbours immediately opposite us had a large area behind their house that was full of rubbish.  On more than one occasion he managed to drag himself still on the lead across the road, up their drive and then begin to play among all the rubbish.  Rescues were needed and I was always a bit concerned that the lead would become so entangled that he would be strangled but fortunately that never happened.  On the whole they were happy to sit in the garden chairs with their leads ‘anchored’ to the ground.

These cats were also keen on sitting in cupboards as well as sitting up high. They enjoyed Christmas and the decorations.  By this time we had digital cameras so we have a photographic record and I have made photobooks.

Form the beginning they came to Cornwall.  We had the journey well organised.  Often, we stopped at Waitrose in Cirencester to buy food and have lunch.  There was a large car park and we would park at the far end of it, then let them loose in the car.  There was also the time that we were driving back from Cornwall at New Year when we ‘lost’ the spike that sealed the door to the cat basket.  We had stopped for lunch and then started off again and in the middle of Bodmin moor, Nui got out of the basket, climbed into the front of the car and started walking around in the footwells!  Not good news so we had to stop (it was beginning to snow) and get him back into the basket.  No sign of the spike but fortunately I had some knitting with me so we were able to close the basket with a knitting needle.  We then had to phone the place where we had had lunch.  They found the spike and posted it to us.

In Cornwall they had their favourite places and once again these tended to be up high.

Nui rearranging the Christmas hangings

Iti on top of the TV in Cornwall

In the summer of 2002 we went to Norway to visit my sister and her husband who were living there.  We sent the cats back to the breeder where they did well although the breeder thought that Iti was not litter-trained.  She was.  It must have just been the stress of the ‘holiday’.

We moved to Cornwall at the beginning of 2006.  The garden here is walled so it seemed safe to let them off the leads but we always kept a close eye on them.  Now it is we who have problems getting around the garden.  Nui was always keen on climbing up the wall at the back and going to visit the neighbours.  This meant our going out the side gate which we never use and walking up the road and into the neighbour’s garden to collect him although on some occasions we managed to talk him down from here.   As I said earlier, Iti only lived till she was eight.  She developed the dreaded kidney failure and died one very cold Christmas.  Fortunately she was not ill for long although we realised that she had probably been ill for some time as she used to spend a lot of time in the airing cupboard and not want to go in the garden, even to eat grass.   We did not think too much about this because the weather was getting colder and colder.

Nui lived till the day before his thirteenth birthday.  We got him two sisters when Iti died and this worked out very well.  He was particularly close to Hinemoa, the smaller of them.  His health was not brilliant as when Iti took ill he also developed something which gave him awful diarrohea.  This recurred at intervals of several weeks.  It meant the laundry was constant and there were times when I had to shut him out of my bedroom so that he could not get on the bed.  He was also on steroids for several years as the kidney complaint kicked in.

In summer in Cornwall we could let them loose in the garden because of the wall and they used to enjoy lying in the sun and sleeping the afternoon away.  They also enjoyed walking around the beds.

Tobacco picking

I left school in December 1962.  I was going to university in Wellington but the term did not start until the beginning of March so we all wanted to find holiday jobs.  I had previously worked in my father’s office, mainly as a filing clerk, but the time we had available meant something more adventurous was called for.  After all, once Christmas and the main holiday season was over, there was the whole of February to fill!  We also wanted money.  We were home-based students which meant our families continued to support us financially but it was expected that we would work in order to pay for clothes, holidays and entertainment as well as contributing by paying for our own textbooks where possible.

The range of holiday jobs for women was limited.  Tradition had it that men could work in unskilled agricultural jobs but women were largely confined to office or shop work or working as domestics in hotels.  There was, however, a long tradition of vacation jobs in agriculture, particularly fruit picking.  Several girls from our year at school sorted out jobs picking soft fruit in Nelson at the top of the South Island, but I was too late for this and all the jobs had gone.  I had no intention of returning to my father’s office but had not given the alternatives much thought.  Then one of my classmates asked me if I would like to join her and a friend of hers from primary school who were planning to pick tobacco.  Unlike raspberry picking, this was a job that was generally done by full-time seasonal workers rather than students as the picking season ran from late January through to May.  Contracts were all organised through the Department of Labour. I cannot really remember how the arrangements were made. I did not do any of it.  I have two memories of the recruitment process.  The first was that the Department of Labour would not allow you to work for them unless you were over eighteen.  I was only seventeen, with my eighteenth birthday coming up in April.  My school friend’s birthday was in May.   We found out that we could take the work if our parents gave permission but I knew that mine never would.  They were the kind of people who made us pay full fare on the bus the minute we turned fourteen, and would not allow us to go to films that were recommended for older age groups.  So I decided not to tell them about the age restriction.  My second memory is that our next door neighbour, who was an older person with adult children, was very against the idea.  Later I realised why she held these views. ‘Nice’ girls like us who had been to a fee-paying school, did not do unskilled agricultural work!  We went for the month of February, although the other workers were on contracts for much longer.  It was very valuable experience in rubbing off a few corners from our sheltered existence.

I have vivid memories of some of the experiences we had but cannot recall a lot of it at all.  I knew that the area where we were going was where one of my great-grandmothers had grown up and that my grandmother had gone there often on holiday but I never thought to ask my grandmother about it.  It is only recently that I have learnt about the history of the area.  Obviously it was agricultural.  The main town was Motueka and the farm we lived on was about two miles from there, at a place called Riwaka.  I cannot remember anything about our journey to get there. I know we must have gone on the ferry boat which ran from Wellington to Picton and then taken a Newman’s bus (coach) from Picton to Nelson and I assume on to Motueka.  The farmer picked us up there and drove us to Riwaka and our ‘digs’ which was a hop pickers’ hut.  Hop picking did not start until March so, although there were two or three of these huts in a paddock (field) none of them was occupied until we arrived and we were the only people on that part of the farm for our entire stay.  The main part of the farm was some distance away and each morning we were driven there.  The small part where we stayed consisted of a field of hops and one of tobacco.  If you walked through both fields you came to the Motueka river, a place we came to know well.  The farmer had acquired this farm as additional land and his younger son and wife lived there.  Everyone else, including the other workers, lived on the main farm.

It is only in doing a little on-line research in order to write this, that I have learnt about the tobacco industry in Nelson at that time (the mid-sixties).  Apparently tobacco was a popular crop because you needed only a relatively small piece of land.  I knew that Nelson was extremely sunny and that was one reason for the crops that grew there.  The industry had expanded considerably after the second world war and it was a major employer of seasonal labour in the nineteen fifties and sixties.  We were obviously there when the industry was at its height as by the mid-sixties there was a surplus of tobacco and in the two years after the 1964-65 season the number of farmers fell by 200 to 529.  What I do remember is that there was a lot of talk about mechanisation.  Everything on our farm was done by hand but people talked about someone who had bought a machine which went through the field with men (and they were men) who stood underneath and tied the tobacco as it was picked.  I remember someone saying that our farm acquired a tying machine the following year.  Of course, everyone smoked at this time and I can remember imported tobacco from Greece being stacked in the wharf sheds in Wellington.  The industry died out in the 1970s, probably because of initiatives to stop people smoking.   The farmers sold their crops in advance to one of the main tobacco/cigarette manufacturers.

In addition to the two parts of ‘our’ farm, another farmer with a very small property employed three workers who worked with us for most of the week.  These women were ‘pommy migrants’, i.e. English immigrants who had come to New Zealand on assisted passages.  They were psychiatric nurses and were only supposed to work as such so they had ‘run away’ from their employers.  No-one seemed bothered about this.  . I cannot remember this second farmer having any male employees of this own but on the fifth day he was ‘lent’ men by our farmer.  Our farmer grew for Rothmans and the other one grew for Wills.

There was a clear delineation in work between the sexes.  The men picked the tobacco and the women ‘tied’ it.  This task meant tying bunches of leaves onto manuka poles which were then put into the kiln and dried for a week.  I remember that when we arrived, we were told that as we were only working part of the season, we would not be taught to tie but would be confined to passing bunches of leaves to the women who stood next to the poles and tied the bunches on.  The poles were laid horizontally and stretched between two trestles.  The picked tobacco was brought from the fields on open-topped trailers and we workers stood alongside them.  As soon as a pole was full of tied bunches of leaves, a male worker would remove the filled pole and put it on a trailer to go to the kiln.  Although we were not supposed to learn to tie, our fellow-workers took pity on us and taught us in the lunch-hour.  I took to tying like a duck to water and can still remember how to do it!  I remember that when I returned to Wellington I had quite a swollen wrist.  I guess these days we would say I had a repetitive strain injury.

The working day

As I remember it, we worked at harvesting approximately three days a week.  On the other days we did ‘lateralling’ which meant working our way along the lines of plants and pulling off the side shoots so that the main leaves would grow stronger.  I think we worked an ordinary 8 am to 4.30 pm day, five days a week.  I seem to remember that our weekends were free although we needed this time for our domestic chores.  There was one famous week when the weather was very humid and it rained so much that we could only work three and a half days.  As we were motivated by the desire to make money, when I read on the notice board that overtime was paid at time and a half, we volunteered to work on Saturday.  It was very steamy and hard work that day but we thought of the money we were going to earn.  Little did we realise that because we had not worked a full week, we were only paid at the normal rate!  The farmer must have thought we were mad to work in such conditions since no-one had told us we had to.

The working day was broken up by ‘smokos’ and I seem to remember we had a proper lunch break although I cannot remember what we had for lunch.   I think we must have had packed lunches.  At the end of the day, we were driven back to our bit of the farm.  We generally then went for a swim in the river.  We walked through the hop field and the tobacco field until we came to the bank of the river.  One week there were sheep in the hop field, eating down the grass.  That was the week I trod on an old nail which went right into my heel.  I was very glad my tetanus injections were up to date.  The farmer’s wife, who had been a nurse, said I would be all right which was true but in NZ you had to be very careful about the risk of tetanus.

There were swimming holes in the river so it was quite safe.  We used to pretend to be Shakespeare’s Ophelia and coast downstream on the current quoting Shakespeare.  This was because we had studied Hamlet the previous year and learnt a lot of the main speeches by heart.  The water was pretty cold but you expect that in rivers and there were really no facilities for overall washing in our hut.  We did not expect there to be as most people at that time relied on swimming to keep clean when on holiday.

After our swim, we walked back to our hut and prepared dinner.  The hut consisted of two rooms: a bedroom and a living room with a very small wood-burning range on which we had to learn to cook.  This was occasionally a problem.  I can remember on one occasion we came back to very over-cooked sausages.  On another quite famous occasion we thought we had set the place on fire.  Smoke was pouring out the roof and we had to ask the farmer’s wife to come over and help us.  There was much laughter as we, being city girls, knew nothing about ranges.  We had failed to pull out the dampers so the chimney was blocked and all the smoke poured into the living room.  After our evening meal, we would wash our smalls and drape them round the bedroom to dry.  There was no TV in New Zealand in those days and I cannot remember if we had a radio, probably not.  For entertainment, we would read. I had taken several set books for the English course I was planning to do at university and was glad to have read them in advance, only to find when I enrolled at university, that I had to do a different English course because I was not ‘majoring’ in English but doing it as a subsidiary subject.

At that time in New Zealand, shops were not open at the weekend, but stayed open until 9 pm on Friday evenings.  We were usually able to go into Motueka on Friday evenings for late night shopping.  I remember buying two pairs of shoes: one pair of red ones with flat soles and another pair in white that had ‘baby Louis’ heels.  As I was quite tall, I never wore stilettos which were just coming into fashion.  I was afraid high heels would make me taller than the boys and women were supposed to be smaller than men so being tall could be a problem.  There were plenty of other people my height among my friends and I now know that one of my father’s aunts, born in the 1870s, was six foot tall. 

Farm life

There were also a number of incidents which showed us city girls that we were now in the country.  One was when the farmer killed a chicken by cutting off its head and then leaving it to run round in the field that was immediately outside our hut.  Another was at the main farm when it was time for the family to get some meat.  I already knew that farmers killed their own lifestock and then hung it up to ‘season’ but despite having spent my early childhood in a fairly rural community, I had never seen this happen.  Now I did.  One morning there was an announcement that they would kill a sheep for meat.  I do not think we witnessed the actual slaughter but I remember that at the morning ‘smoko’ there was a sheep, dangling on a hook near us.

As I have already said, one week a small flock of sheep were brought in and put outside our hut with the aim of getting them to chew the grass and keep it short.  Fine, but no-one warned up that this would bring the flies.  That week was not good as the flies were everywhere and we had to be very careful to cover up all our food.  We were rather glad when someone arrived and took them away again.

Free time

Obviously if we only worked five days a week, we had free time at weekends.   One weekend we went to the beach with ‘our’ farmer and his young family.  We went to Kaiteriteri, a beach that was famous for its yellow/white sand.  Most beaches in New Zealand had grey sand so this was thought to be very superior.  I see from the map that Kaiteriteri is very near Motueka although it involved a car journey so seemed to be some distance away.  I also have a faint memory of a trip that involved going over the Takaka Hill.  I see this would have been a journey over the hill to Takaka and the moth of the Takaka river but I can only remember being in a car and nothing of our destination.  Otherwise I do not know what we did at weekends although I think we may have gone out with the other workers, all of whom were older than us and several of whom had cars.

Taupo holidays from Hastings

I went to Taupo twice when we lived in Hastings, the first time in 1952 soon after I had been in hospital and then again in 1953.  On the first occasion I went on my own with my aunt and grandmother.  The second time Margaret came too and our father drove us there although I think he may then have had to go back home to work.  We also had a couple of holidays with our cousins after we had moved to Wellington but the group was really too big and it created an awful lot of work for the women so when I was a teenager we used to go for the last fortnight of the school holidays at the end of January while the Auckland family lost a week of their original six weeks.  It is difficult for me to remember which incidents happened on the first two occasions and which on the later joint holidays.

Swimming in the lake with my cousin  1952

We knew about Taupo long before we went there.  My paternal grandparents bought one of the first pieces of land suitable for a ‘bach’ in about 1923 and built a small cottage.  My father spent all his childhood holidays there.  Our house was on the edge of the lake in a prime position.  My grandfather had initially bought ‘the back section’ of two and built right on the front boundary.  It had uninterrupted views 26 miles across the lake to the mountains of Ruapehu, Tongariro and Ngauruhoe at the southern end of the lake.  At some point the purchaser of the front property, most of which was on a lower level was persuaded to sell the back strip which was raised above the rest to my grandfather along with a narrow strip down the side which became the path down to the beach.  We had to cross the main road that ran along the lake but the beach just opposite was very good, once you had dodged the traffic. The lake was famous for trout fishing and had safe swimming places although it was not at all developed and holidaying there was quite a primitive experience even in the 1950s.  The best thing about ‘our beach’ was that there were natural hot pools at one end.  We children would dig down and find hot water which we could then paddle in.  Another advantage was that there was a small sandbank not far out so it was really safe for swimming.  Even so, we were taught to have great respect for the lake and its ability to become rough very quickly.

My grandmother and aunt took me to Taupo the first time.  I did not know until many years later that my grandmother’s mother had been killed on the Napier-Taupo road.  I do remember her telling me about how it used to take two or three days to get there from Napier.  They used to spend one night at The Terraces hotel which had hot springs.  Today State Highway 5 as the Napier-Taupo road is now called, is still a very rugged road through high mountainous territory.  There is a dreadful road toll, these days related to the large number of logging trucks that use it.

The Taupo cottage was very basic.  There was a kerosene stove and an Elsan chemical toilet which you reached up a path.  Old newspapers and magazines were kept there.  The smell was pungent to put it mildly and I can still smell it as I write this.  It was our cousins’ job to empty the Elsan weekly.   but as girls we did not have to do that sort of job. There were three water tanks to serve the house.  Two of them were on the house roof and the water from those was only used for washing as there had once been a dead opossum in one of them.  The third tank was on a tank stand.  Water for cooking came from that and we used to stand beside it and clean our teeth using mugs for the water.  We learnt about tapping the rungs of the tanks to check how much water was in them and to be very abstemious in our use of water.  

The main room of the cottage had a huge open fireplace through the back wall of which you could see daylight.  As we only went to Taupo in summer this was never lit but we were told that my father and his brothers used to go up to Taupo from Napier to fish in their youth, sometimes in winter, and how a glass of water left on the mantlepiece froze overnight.  The kitchen was in a kind of lean-to but attached to the house.  In front of the main room was a glassed-in porch with amazing views.  There was one double bedroom off this and one off the main room plus a tiny room off the other side of the porch.  There was an old fashioned free-standing bath somewhere near the bedroom but I cannot remember anyone using it.  The normal way of getting clean was in the lake and my grandmother used to take a cake of soap down here. The room off the glassed-in porch had originally been a store room but by the 1950s was used as a bedroom, usually for a baby in a cot.  There were steps down into the garden from the porch but that was about all.  Boys used to sleep outside in tents. 

Kanuka in 2008 - much improved from 1950s

There were lots of trees in the garden.  A huge eucalyptus was the main feature but there was an avenue of silver birches leading in from the road which someone had planted after the war.  Tents were pitched to accommodate children but there was no garden as such, just a raspberry patch on the narrow strip of land that had originally been part of the front property.  There were constant discussions about ways of improving the house but nothing happened until much later in our lives.  I seem to remember that at this time we slept in the second bedroom, our boy cousins in a tent and their baby sister in the little room.

The ‘other Hoadleys’ as they were often called used to spend all the Christmas summer holidays at Taupo.  My uncle was an architect so had three weeks’ leave at Christmas.  He would then return to Auckland on his own and come back at Auckland Anniversary weekend which was the last weekend in January and drive the family back to Auckland for the start of the new school term.  I remember our cousins being allowed to run round barefoot all summer and on one occasion one of them saying they had even gone to church barefoot!  This was not an option for us as when she was very small Margaret, who was allergic to bee stings, had trod on a bee and her whole foot had swollen up.

The domestic routine and food was different.  Milk was delivered in a billy but it was unpasteurised and had to be boiled which we thought made it taste horrible.  For breakfast we had proper porridge made with rolled oats.  At home we ate an instant porridge which cooked quickly.  Cooking rolled oats was a major task.  I seem to remember that we had eggs and and/or bacon as at home but I cannot remember what we children drank, given how awful the milk tasted.  It may have been cocoa as that would have killed the nasty taste.

Two of our cousins were what my father referred to disparagingly as ‘fussy eaters’.  Basically they would not eat any cooked vegetables and were served raw peas, carrots etc. as well as salad.  They also ate a lot of processed cheese although Chesdale was a big feature of all our childhoods as it was mild tasting. 

Lighting was kerosene lamps but I think we children went to bed before it was dark.  I can remember my grandmother doing the ironing, using flat irons that had to be heated on the top of the kerosene stove.  I think clothes washing was done in a copper which lived where the two water tanks were.  Electricity came to Taupo at the end of the fifties so after the time I am writing about and piped water about the same time, so after we left Hastings. 

The sitting room contained various articles for entertainment.  There was a gramophone and some records, including some that were yellow.  The most popular were songs such as ‘Pop-eye the sailor man’.  There were books but we never read any of them and always took library books on holiday.  There were board games of which the best was Monopoly.  If it rained we spent a lot of time painting and drawing.  Both my father and my uncle were artistic and used to line us up at the table in the front porch and give us lessons although those I remember are from a slightly later time.

One job for the children was picking raspberries for lunch.  We used to love doing this.  We took various kitchen containers and went into the raspberry patch at the front of the section.  These were then eaten with cream.  With no refrigerator there was no ice cream apart from the time we bought one for Margaret, who was in bed with mumps, only to have it melt before we could get it home.  That was the year we had to do the shopping by boat. 

My uncle owned a small dinghy which we later nick-named ‘the coracle’ and an adult would row it the mile along the foreshore to town.  This was because my uncle had returned to Auckland leaving the family without a car.

Because Taupo was very high up and quite rural the night sky was amazing and we learnt some astronomy such as how to identify the Southern Cross constellation.  There was a huge telescope in the cottage.  It sat on a tripod and was not really suitable for children. On one of these holidays, my cousin dropped it on my toes.  My big toe went very black and weeks later the nail dropped off.

There were no wasps in New Zealand until the mid-fifties.  The story went that they entered New Zealand on a plane from the USA and gradually spread south from Auckland.  On one of our first holidays from Wellington we met them for the first time.  Remember that Margaret was allergic to bee stings so we were all pretty frightened of winged insects.  On one occasion Dad and Prior took us to Five Mile – a stretch of the lake a little further south of the main town.  They wanted to fish so we children played about and swam.  I remember we were plagued by wasps and spent the whole afternoon trying to avoid them.  One problem was that we had red swimming hats and had been told that wasps loved the colour red. I can remember them buzzing around our heads all the time.  We tried to stay in the water to avoid them.

There were also lots of sandflies and mosquitos.  On two holidays we later had with the Auckland family Margaret and I slept in a tent.  I remember putting my head under the bedclothes in order to avoid the mosquitos which used to make a horrible noise. I became very adept at doing this, so much so that years later my friends used to say how I would put my head under the covers if one came near, even if I appeared to be asleep!