Finding, p.1
Finding, page 1
A family boards a ship bound for New Zealand. What will they find there?
Tests lie ahead — war, earthquakes, brushes with death. And so do some thrilling discoveries . . .
Master storyteller David Hill traces the fortunes of two New Zealand families over seven generations and through 130 years of adventure and discovery, tragedy and triumph.
CONTENTS
1886: AGGIE
1897: NIALL
1918: DUNCAN
1938: FLORENCE
1957: ALAN
1981: AILSA
1999: MAGGIE
2018: CALLUM
FOLLOW PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE
To Puketapu, and all my people there.
Thanks to Massey University, where this novel was begun.
AGGIE 1886
* * *
The September days are shorter and cooler now. Autumn is here, and the purple heather flowers have nearly finished blooming.
My little brother Niall and his friends are playing Soldiers while we wait on the wharf. They march up and down and pretend to fire rifles. Niall wears the red woollen vest our Grandma Coira knitted. He says it makes him look like a real army man.
Just after we reached the wharfs this morning, Niall and the other boys began shouting and pointing. A great steel shape was slicing through the water, fifty yards from shore, smoke pouring from its funnels. ‘’Tis the Ajax!’ someone called. ‘The new battleship!’ We could see the huge gun barrels, the bow built to ram enemy vessels. (Niall is just seven, but he loves to talk about such things.)
Scores of people sit or stand around us. Some smile at me. Are they feeling the excitement that stirs in me when I think of the adventure ahead? Other faces are sad. We are leaving our beloved Scotland for a new land on the other side of the world.
We hear that faraway New Zealand has clean air and rivers. Children will grow strong there. The small farms here in Scotland have been swallowed up by big English landowners, and the cities do not have enough work. Shepherds like my father, or carpenters, ditch-diggers, factory workers, have to make different lives in a different land.
A breeze sighs past. I pull my shawl around me, and something touches my wrist. My silver bracelet. Every time I see it, my heart beats faster. It is so beautiful, with its plaited patterns and clasp like a tiny thistle.
My Auntie Flora gave it to me four days ago, while Mother, Father, Niall and I stood waiting for the wagon that was to carry us away from our farm for ever.
‘This belonged tae your Great-great-grandmother Maidie,’ she whispered. ‘Take it wi’ ye, Aggie, my darling niece. ’Twas meant for your cousin Nettie, had she lived. I dinna ken what treasures you will find in New Zealand, but here is one of ours tae carry across the seas. Every time ye touch the thistle, think of the purple flowers o’ Scotland.’
I stroke the bracelet while I gaze around me. Niall is back now, staring at the railway locomotive that stands hissing and snorting on its steel lines where the roadway meets our wharf. Mother shrank away when she saw it. Father took her arm. ‘An iron horse, Helen. ’Tis slow and strong and noisy, like all horses.’
Beside the wharf rise the masts and funnel of our ship, the Princess Louisa, named after one of Queen Victoria’s daughters. This is the vessel that will sail south for four months, taking us to our new home.
Our luggage is already aboard. Men with dirty hands and faces are hoisting sacks of coal onto the deck. The Princess Louisa has engines as well as sails. Niall pretends to understand how they work, but I don’t believe him.
A man in a black top-hat, with a lady in a lilac-colour dress and bonnet, is walking up the gangway, holding onto the rail as the ship dips and rises in the water. They must be some of the rich passengers, with proper bunks in their cabins instead of just a mattress on the floor, and even a steward to fetch water for them. ‘Och! They’ll be just as seasick as we puir folk,’ my mother laughed.
Something glides through the air above us. I squint up, pushing back my own bonnet. An osprey, the wonderful fishing hawk that Niall and I have watched so often from the cliffs near our farm. Its brown and white wings are stretched wide, its curved talons tense.
The wings fold, and it slices down like a sword, gouging the waves. Then it rises, climbing towards the low sun, a fish clutched in its talons. A pair of seagulls flap at it, screeching and circling, trying to make it drop its catch. The osprey ignores them, wheeling upwards until the gulls fall away, snapping at each other. Will we see birds like that in the distant land that will be our home?
A hand rests on my shoulder. My father watches the soaring osprey. His black beard juts upwards.
He glances down, smiles at me. ‘That’s us, Aggie, lass. Setting our sights on high. Seizing our chances, and flying away tae prosper. A bonnie wee farm I’ll be making for us all.’
His words are brave, but his face is sad, like my Auntie Flora’s. I heard him murmuring other words of hope to my mother, the night before we left our farm. ‘Helen, Helen, my puir dear …’ he went. I heard the sound of her weeping. Hardly ever had I heard that before.
Men begin shouting from the Princess Louisa. A sound like a trumpet blares out, and we all jump. Steam is gushing from a pipe beside one funnel. Again the sound blares. Around us, families stand up, gathering bundles together, talking to children; Niall leaves his game with the other boys, and runs to join us.
I touch the silver thistle of my bracelet again. Will there be purple flowers in New Zealand? What will the native people, the Maori, be like? It must be spring there now, halfway around the great curve of the world. How strange that must feel!
And will there be riches, as Auntie Flora says? Those of us who live there in the years ahead — what sorts of treasure will they find? I grow excited again when I think of it. Yet the most precious thing I can think of just now is for all of us to be happy there.
We file up the gangway. ‘Och, Angus,’ Mother murmurs to my father. ‘Never tae walk on our bonnie homeland again!’
I gaze at the wooden planks beneath my feet, and the cold, slapping waves below. Fear stabs me now, along with excitement. The sea is grey, deep and unfriendly. It looks the worst water in the world.
NIALL 1897
* * *
Eleven years. Almost eleven years since we left the shores of Scotland, and sailed halfway around the world to New Zealand.
Father was talking at dinner last night, and said, ‘Aye, Helen, it must be near eight years now since we last saw the bonnie purple heather in bloom.’ Mother shook her head. ‘Sure, ’tis no’ that long, Angus. Niall is—’
Aggie broke in, while her hands searched for knife and fork. ‘It’s longer than eight, Ma. I was ten, and Niall had just turned seven. Janet was born the year we arrived here, remember? So it’s nearer eleven.’
My parents were silent. Aggie had hold of knife and fork now, but she and our small sister Janet sat still as well. Mother turned away, to ladle out more stew from the pot hanging above the fire. She is more bent now than when we first came to this land. I gazed at her and suddenly saw how she is older.
And I am now a man, almost eighteen. My friend Haare and I can lift the great sacks of kumara when they are dug. We handle axes and saws almost as well as our fathers. We can dig ditches for an hour without resting.
Sometimes I can milk our cows faster than Father, though I would never say so out loud. He still doesn’t like cows much: ‘Och, I was brought up tae be a shepherd, Niall,’ he told me. ‘Sheep may be puir silly creatures, but they’ve been meat and wool tae our family for generations. Sheep are my life, laddie.’ But he’s had to change his mind.
Cows can eat the shrubs and tree leaves which grow at the bush’s edge. Their calves are too big for hawks and magpies to attack — not like the poor wee lambs that we saw lying dead, with wounds in their side where beaks had torn at them.
Cows give us more meat, and milk, butter, even cheese. Nor do they drown in the river, the way our stupid sheep did. And the river here — the Why-Mow-Ana, Haare and his people call it — can become a death-trap after heavy rain. It thunders past, booming and roaring, dragging rocks along its bed, bursting its banks to gouge new channels.
We hear it thundering in the night sometimes. People have drowned, trying to cross it. There are calls for a bridge, but it will need to be a high one to stay above the floods.
Yet on summer days, the Why-Mow-Ana is the most gentle of streams, glittering across the stones. Children swim by the big shelves of rock, or at the bend below the cemetery. Janet and I, or Haare’s younger sister Ngaio, or Hahona if she is not busy, lead Aggie down there. She sits and listens to them playing, or paddles in the shallows.
Eleven years. I finished school long ago. I wonder if my initials are still carved under the lid of the desk that I shared with Haare?
We learned to read and write well there, well enough for the farming life, anyway. Father cannot write, in spite of Mother trying to teach him. He placed a hand on my shoulder once, when I showed him a page in my spelling book. ‘Och, you’ll be a cleverer man than me, Niall, lad.’ I just hope I’m as good a man as him.
In our last year at school, when we were thirteen, Father helped build a roof of wooden shingles for the school-house. The old one of raupo reeds was so thin that rain leaked through and dropped on us as we sat at lessons. ‘Nine sevens are sixty-three. Nine eights are seventy-two. Nine nines are — Ow! Sir, there’s water falling on my head!’
Mr McDougall used to laugh, and get us to multiply the number of drops. He was such a good teacher. I hid behind ou
So much has changed since we sailed on the Princess Louisa for this new land and the treasure Father hoped to find here. It has changed most for Aggie, of course. I will speak of that later.
I remember parts of the voyage. I recall fish leaping from the waves, and skimming through the air to dive beneath the water once more. What a marvel. And I remember the days as we crossed the Equator, when the sun burned down so fiercely, our bare feet couldn’t walk on the wooden deck, and hot tar bubbled out between the planks. Then there were days of storm, when our ship plunged and bucked as if it would thrust itself down to the bottom of the sea, and we huddled on our mattresses, waiting for death to come crashing upon us. I remember, too, the deaths that did come: the children who died of fever; a sailor falling from the mast. I will speak of some of them later, too.
But finally we arrived, on a beach of black sand with dark trees massed behind. No bonnie purple heather, no woods where the leaves turn gold and float to the ground in autumn. The woods — the ‘bush’ — are always green and shadowy here.
We walked for three days. Father, other men who had sailed on the Princess Louisa, with Haare’s father and others from the pa, went in front, carrying our luggage, then coming back to help the women and children through rivers, along narrow trails among the trees.
We might have died if Haare’s people had not aided us. While their men helped carry our goods, their women and girls brought us the sweet-tasting kumara; plump pigeons they call keh-reh-roo; river eels smoked over fires. Our flour had gone rotten on the long voyage; many of our seeds would not grow. Maori food kept us alive through that first winter.
We made mistakes with food in those early days. And one mistake nearly killed Janet.
She was about four years old, I suppose. After lunch one day, Haare and I wanted to go exploring for the fat keh-reh-roo pigeons, to find where they roosted, so Haare’s family could come with long spears to hunt them. Janet asked to come with us, but we said no. She would make too much noise.
So Hahona and Aggie said she could go with them, to collect water-cress by the side of the river. We all ate so much water-cress in those first years, I worried I might start turning green.
We set off down to the Why-Mow-Ana together, Hahona and Aggie hand-in-hand, Janet prattling along beside them. Haare and I turned off into the bush to look for birds, and the girls went on together. We could hear them chattering — as girls always do — while we searched among the trees.
We found no pigeons, and after a while we knew why. There were magpies around, the squawking black-and-white birds some foolish person brought over to New Zealand from Australia. We see them in larger and larger numbers. They are noisy; they are bullies; people say they steal bright things like hair-combs and buttons. Aggie says they remind her of the seagulls she saw trying to attack an osprey once. The keh-reh-roo pigeons are too big to be scared of them, but they build their nests well away, where the magpies will not steal their eggs.
A couple of the Australian invaders swooped and squawked above us. We threw sticks at them until they flew off and settled on a branch, still squawking.
‘Look!’ Haare bent down, and picked up a glossy black-and-white feather from the grass. ‘I am a fighter!’ He stuck the feather in his long, black hair, and suddenly — yes, he did look like a Maori warrior, the one in the photograph that Mr McDougall had on our classroom wall.
I began to search for a feather, too. Down by the river, the girls chattered on. ‘Janet?’ I heard Aggie call. ‘Janet, where are you, lassie? Don’t get lost.’
I bent, scooped up a second glossy feather and started to slide it into my own hair. Then Haare and I jerked as Hahona screamed. Aggie shouted something, then she and Hahona were yelling and shrieking. Haare and I rushed towards the river.
We burst out of the trees onto a level patch with a few scattered bushes. Janet lay on the ground beside one bush. Hahona crouched over her. Aggie stumbled towards them, hands outstretched.
I clutched my big sister’s hand, gasped ‘It’s Niall!’, pulled her towards the others. Janet’s eyes were closed. She moaned and twisted. I saw purple stains on her mouth.
‘She eats the tutu!’ Hahona gasped. She pointed at the bush by which Janet sprawled, and I saw the glossy black berries hanging from it. ‘They make dead!’
‘Her head!’ Aggie went. ‘Where is her head?’ Hahona and I guided her until she knelt by the small, moaning figure. She released her fierce grip on my fingers, and her own hands searched across Janet’s face. She held something black-and-white. The magpie feather: it must have been in my hand when I seized hers.
She found Janet’s quivering lips, took the feather, and slipped it inside my small sister’s mouth. ‘Hai!’ exclaimed Hahona. ‘Yes!’ Suddenly I understood.
Janet coughed and gagged. Her body twisted. Haare and I grabbed her legs and arms, and held her still. Aggie pushed the feather further in. It must be reaching halfway down Janet’s throat by now.
She gagged again. Her chest heaved. She opened her mouth, and—
‘See!’ went Haare. ‘There the tutu! And she eaten meat for lunch, eh?’
But I shall never forget Mother’s face as we came through the back gate into our garden, me carrying Janet. She’d been sick again, but now she was awake and talking.
Mother dropped a pail of milk, and ran towards us. ‘Janet, my bairn! What happened?’ Her eyes were wide and full of fear. One daughter had lost her sight on the journey to this new land. Had the other lost her life?
No. Janet was soon well again, and the news of Aggie’s feather spread up the valley. The next time Hahona led her to the pa, people patted her hands, said ‘Kah-pai, Aggie! Good, good!’
‘The womans — they can do things, yes?’ Ngaio laughed to me. I said nothing. It’s safer that way.
Oh, and I never found my magpie feather again. I don’t think I wanted to!
The ‘pa’ of which I speak, the Maori village, looks simple. A few huts with walls and roofs of reeds; a fence of high wooden stakes and a ditch to protect them from any enemy. Haare’s people journeyed to live here, just like us. Hahona told Aggie how they came here after losing their old land in fighting with other tribes, and after the Pah-kay-hah (their name for us) took away more of it. Father shook his head when he heard. ‘Puir souls. Driven from their homes, as we were. They are so good tae us; we must be good tae them.’
Have we been? I wonder, sometimes. We have given them spades and hoes for their gardens. They now raise cows, just as we do. They have candles and blankets, and warm woollen clothes for the winter. Haare’s and Hahona’s young sister Ngaio (not so young now: she is growing into a woman) has become a fine spinner, making clothes from the wool that her brother shears on nearby farms.
Yet we have brought terrible things with us as well. Diseases that their bodies have never known, and cannot fight. Two of the children born on our voyage from Scotland had measles when we arrived. Soon, many Maori people caught the disease. Four of them died; Haare’s father was one.
Some of his tribe wanted to drive us away, take up their stone weapons against us. It was Haare’s mother, Areta, who stopped them. She spoke of the friendships growing among the children of both races, said words like those my father Angus had uttered. ‘These Pah-kay-hah have lost their homes, just as we did. They have suffered like us. Let us live together, not against one another.’
So we have stayed. Father and Mother and me, and now Janet. And poor Aggie.
Poor? You will know from what I have written. Aggie is blind.
As the Princess Louisa carved its slow furrow across the ocean, sickness broke out on board. Fever: a terrible burning that grew into a red rash covering faces, chests, the inside of throats. Those who had it begged for water, yet could scarcely swallow or even breathe. Children suffered most. Three wee ones died.
