Black Beech and Honeydew (13 page)

We began to unload the barrow.

The foreman turned away and paused. Into a silence broken only by the high-pitched reiterations of tree frogs, there entered a metallic and continuous sound. A light moved on the railroad and faintly illuminated two figures that faced each other and swayed rhythmically, in the manner of oarsmen, propelling the driving bar of a jigger.

‘This’ll be your gear, I reckon,’ said the foreman.

The men went down the hill to collect it.

At about half-past ten we had set our three houses in order and gone to bed in a trance of fatigue. The bracken crackled and snapped under my blanket. I had begun to wonder if it would make, after all, an uncomfortable bed, when a road slid towards me in a cloud of dust. The driver had fallen asleep; his horses mended their pace and instead of wheeling, sped to the lip of the gorge. We leapt outwards and, after a sickening jolt, fell into oblivion.

At Te Kinga we were woken at dawn by timber men leaving by horse-tramway for their camp, seven miles away in the virgin bush. When we got to know them they suggested that we should spend a day in-back and this was a compliment.

The bush behind Te Kinga was heavy and very tall. It closed round and above us and shut out everything but itself and its immense indifference. The man on our truck was called Sandy: a red blond with a singing drawl in his voice. The boles of great trees moved by against a backdrop of dense, cluttered green. We passed deep through a valley and across a forester’s bridge. There was no sky.

She was lonely, all right, in-back, Sandy agreed in answer to a question from my mother. Some jokers, he said, couldn’t seem to stand it. Take him and his mate. They was sent in to prospect, like. Look out the timber: pick where the tramway’d be drove in. They took a couple of packhorses and was meant to stay in-back for three weeks. ‘You wouldn’t credit it, lady, but after four days we turned it in and come out. It was the quiet. Dead quiet it is, barring the birds. Some jokers reckon it’s haunted. Call it what you like: we was satisfied: it was no good to us. We wasn’t the only jokers got that reaction. It’s well-known.’

And easy to believe, we thought, when we reached the tramway head. Here, in the green dark were a winch, a loco-driven circular saw and, close to the ground, a steel cable that ran inconsequently into the forest. As we watched it, it quivered. From a hidden and
remote distance a human voice gave a drawn-out, beautiful and incredibly desolate cry.

‘That’s the snigger,’ Sandy said. The winch started up with a falsetto blast on its whistle. Sandy told us that if we followed the cable we would come to where they were felling. We would meet the snigger and he would stop us from going in too far. His name was Jock.

The cable jerked and moved towards us. The ground was muddy but the going not too bad because on either side of the cable, undergrowth had been smashed and flattened. It was strange, though, when the bush closed behind us and stifled the sound of the winch. The cable quietly poured itself past us, an endless and incongruous interloper. Presently the call was repeated, nearer at hand now, astonishing in its strength and purity of sound. The cable stopped until the voice started it on its way again. For a time there was no sound beyond that of our own squelching progress. Then we saw a disturbance in the forest, a shudder among tops of saplings. We heard sounds of breaking wood and a heavy drag and at last saw the log. It came lurching towards us, bleeding and chained to the end of the cable. It slowly passed us by, quivering and destructive.

It was followed by a man and a one-eyed horse. This was Jock the snigger and his snig-mare. He had evidently been told that we were coming. He described how he chained the log and escorted it to the winch. Then the mare carried the end of the unwinding chain back to the place where they were felling. When a log jammed, he and the mare cleared it. ‘That’s how she lost an eye. Sapling got it. You see a lot of that with snig-horses.’

My mother said something about his voice.

‘Some jokers carry a whistle,’ Jock said. ‘I don’t seem to fancy it.’

He had halted the felled tree in order to talk to us and now said he must be getting on. His ribs expanded under his singlet and the great sound, ‘Oh-hoy’, was released again. The chain quivered and took up and the log began to move.

Guided by the chunk-chunk of axe-blows, we went as far as Jock had said we might and, at a distance, saw two men, stripped to the waist, poised on either end of a plank that was set in a wound across the bole of a giant tree whose top, far above the tangle of undergrowth, trembled under their blows. They changed to a two-handed
saw, swaying in a superb rhythm. We saw the death of the tree. The plumed top swept down with a great whiffling sound, a crescendo of splitting timber and a thud that jolted the ground under our feet.

In the late afternoon we rode back to Te Kinga on chained logs, still bleeding sap. The next morning we saw them thunder down skids to a breaking-down bench in the mill. I did a painting of this and would have liked to call it ‘Too Bloody Big’, for that was what the millhands said repeatedly of the giant we had seen felled. They defeated it in the end. It passed on to the sawyer’s screaming bench and finally in planks, to a rail truck and so down to the coast or up to Otira.

We made great friends with the people at the little farm. The family consisted of the farmer and his wife and four sons between the ages of eight and seventeen. They were all very fair with clear skins and the luxuriant glossy hair that one sees so often on the Coast. Their physique was magnificent. They were splendid young men and their mother was very proud of them. She confided in my mother that she had dreaded the time when the eldest would be old enough to enlist and was thankful when the Armistice came. Richard persuaded the youngest, Ernie, to sit for him. He was apple-cheeked and blue-eyed. Renoir would have liked to paint him. It was Ernie who told us that his eldest brother was to fight another joker. Fights took place in the evening outside the pub and were, it seemed, formal affairs. Richard and Robin would have liked to see it but decided that they might not be welcome. The next day Ernie said his brother had laid the other joker out cold. They were all very gentle in their manner and used to arrive, speechless and grinning, with offerings of vegetables from their farm.

On a return visit to Te Kinga we met again as old friends and spent New Year’s Eve at the farm playing round games. There were three girls in our party on this occasion and the boys paid us decorous attention. Several days later, the elder brothers went wild-goat shooting on a mountain across Lake Brunner. We saw them go down to their boat. That afternoon one of the local storms, called – I don’t know why – Brucers, got up over the lake. For a time it was very rough but it soon died out and the evening was beautiful. The boys were to have returned at five. At seven their father and some of the millhands crossed the lake in launches. My mother went
down to the farm and watched with the boys’ mother. We could see the flares and hear the gunshots fired by the searchers. At dawn they found the three boys quite close in-shore under a few feet of clear water. They were brought back and we saw a railway truck being pushed up the line to the farm with a tarpaulin covering its load.

They were taken by train to Greymouth and their mother remained there for some time after the funeral. Their father came back to the farm and Ernie helped him.

During my Art School days we returned three times to Westland. These were all painting holidays: mornings and evenings of immense concentration, afternoons when we explored the country or merely glowered at our work. We learned about the behaviour of trees, about the anatomy of mountains, how to lay out the ghost of a subject and then, at the fleeting hour of sunset, seize upon it as if, in fact, one was making another kind of time-study. In the afternoons there were expeditions and from these a patchwork memory recalls disjointed incidents.

In some ways the most vivid recollection is of the first Easter holidays after the war ended.

Here we are, my great friend and fellow student, Phyllis, and I. Our skirts are down to our shins and our hair is coiled about our heads. We are far from being hard-boiled and would, I think, seem singularly vulnerable to our modern contemporaries. We are setting out for Westland and neither of us has ever before taken so considerable an excursion unaccompanied by elders. We are, therefore, elevated and feel hardy and independent. Our journey is enlivened by a hoard of repatriated and demobilized soldiers returning to the Coast. They roar, sing and brandish beer bottles but mysteriously maintain a state of suspended inebriety. When we leave the train at Jackson’s, the first stop down the Otira line, they cheer and wish us luck.

Jackson’s consists, simply, of a pub on the edge of the bush. It is a one-storeyed wooden building, patronized by tunnel-workers, prospectors, swaggers and bushmen, and is run by Mr and Mrs
Clancy and their extremely pretty daughter. The other resident guests are two railwaymen and a foreman from the tunnel. We think they are a little nonplussed by our arrival but seem friendly and pleasant. When Mrs Clancy hears that we are painters she asks us, on an afternoon when we are housebound by rain, if we would touch up a screen which is very dear to her and which has become a little tashed with wear. It turns out to be the most remarkable
meuble
we have ever seen. Handpainted by a cousin in a convent, it presents to our incredulous gaze, pink flamingoes wading in a bog infested by floating kidneys. A lolly-pink-and-chrome sunset is repeated in these waters. Lilies, there are, amidst emerald green reeds and, over all, an oleaginous lustre. We tinker gingerly with scratches and abrasions and at last satisfy Mrs Clancy. It is the screen which she displays to her guests, not our paintings.

Easter Saturday. We have been ‘down the line’ all day, painting, and have caught The Night Train From Grey, back to Jackson’s. With Miss Clancy and one or two weary ladies who have spent the day in Greymouth, we are the only sober passengers in the train, this being the night for revelry on the Coast. Through the carriage stagger at intervals a company of gentlemen paying tribute to Miss Clancy. They chant in chorus that she is ‘the pr’eest girl from Greymouth to Otira
BAR NONE.’
Miss Clancy tosses her head and they break into song:

Have you ever seen the devil with his little pick and shovel,

Digging of pertaters with his tail cocked up?

We hear them as they progress through the train to the leading carriage. They live at Inchbonnie and when we stop there are ejected with difficulty by the guard. This takes some time as he also hangs sacks of meat along the fence for householders who have ordered them from down the line. When the last reveller has been detrained the guard blows his whistle and we move on. Presently, from the rear carriage but drawing nearer, comes another verse of their song.

Have you ever seen his son with his daddy’s gun

Shooting little bunnies with their tails cocked up?

The procession re-enters. Miss Clancy bridles.

–
pr’eest girl from Greymouth to Otira
BAA-AR NONE

They do not pause by, or even look at, Miss Clancy but continue on their way. The guard appears.

‘They got in at the bloody rear,’ he says distractedly, ‘while I was hanging up the bloody meat.’

At Jackson’s they leave the train voluntarily and follow Miss Clancy and Phyllis and me up the hill.

Have you ever seen his wife with a carving knife

Cutting up pertaters with her tail cocked up?

They effect an entry into the pub and we are now enthusiastically included in their tributes. Phyllis comes into my room and we lock the door and sit on the bed. The noise in the bar is formidable. After a time Mr Clancy’s voice and boots are heard in the passage and a chucking out process begins, accompanied by fearful language and a great deal of thumping and scuffling. A door bangs and Mr Clancy returns.

Outside our window in the moonlight they are quarrelling among themselves. A dominant voice says smugly: ‘You oughter be ashamed of yerselves cursing and swearing in front of them two bloody girls.’ There is a general gloomy assent and they retire down the hill.

…
ever seen his daughter with a bucket gettin’ water

From the well that’s in the garden with her tail cocked up?

The voices fade. The last thing we hear is a prolonged
‘BAA-AR NONE’
followed by a howl of vague approbation.

When I returned to Christchurch I wrote an account of this experience. It was accepted by the
Sun.
‘The Night Train From Grey’, was my first venture in professional writing.

When I think about the Coast, many pictures return, some of them with great clarity, others a little blurred and elusive.

Here are my mother, a fellow painter called Bill and I in a farm cart drawn by Tim, an elderly white horse, and hung about with camping and painting impedimenta. We are embarked on a ten-days’ journey along the coast itself from Hokitika to the Franz Josef Glacier. In 1920, Hokitika, founded in the days of the big gold rush, still carries some rags of its former raffishness: deserted dance halls, derelict pubs and, at dawn, a few beachcombers panning the black sand at low tide for gold dust.

The Wallworks were to join us on this expedition but were prevented at the last moment so here we are, an odd little party, camping out at night and following at a walk, since Tim knows no other gait, the convolutions of the lonely coastal road: up and over Mount Hercules, down to Lake Ianthe, in and out of water-races until we find one of them in spate and a row of frustrated motorists on the near side. With a great jangling of billy and frying pan and a grinding over boulders, Tim walks us into the ford. The cart lurches and tilts, water churns about its axles. Tim plunges and veers but knows his job and we emerge triumphant on the far side. We camp in the bush beside a lake but are tormented in the daytime by sandflies that, sated with our blood, blunder on to our wet canvases and stick in the paint. At night, mosquitoes take over. We move on and at last arrive at the Franz Josef where there is an empty hut. We stay here in preference to the tourists’ hotel.

The rata is in flower. It splashes the lower slopes of the forest with washes of incredible scarlet and overhangs the green caverns of the glacier. Bill and I, who have both started big canvases, paint steadily day after day. Tim meets a wall-eyed mare as elderly as himself and bolts with her into the bush from which after an exhausting search we extract him, very much above himself, leaving his decrepit minion to flaunt round in circles with her tail up, giving broken-winded whinnyings.

We spend a day on the glacier with a famous guide, Peter Graham. He is a man of immense charm and tells us in a plain unaffected manner that sometimes he hears voices in the deep crevasses. It is a misty day and the going is slippery. A woman in the party who has been to Switzerland wails continuously that there, on much less tricky ice, we would have been roped. ‘They rope you for anything in Switzerland,’ Peter Graham says. My mother, who is immediately behind him, unobtrusively holds a strap of his rucksack. ‘It made me feel surprisingly better,’ she says afterwards. We have to jump over a crevasse. It is no more than a long stride but very deep and green. Rendered lopsided by the heavy paintbox I have been foolish enough to bring, I am secretly appalled. On the return trip we find hot springs a few feet from the lateral moraine of the glacier. If you want to bathe in the big one, Peter Graham says, you cool it with lumps of ice.