The Lonely Sea and the Sky (6 page)

  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 champion 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.

  Although I enjoyed much of the work, I could not feel settled. I was lonely, though I did not understand why, and I felt that I was in the wrong job. I wanted to be an author. (A mixture of Conrad, Kipling and Somerset Maugham, say.) I left the farm, and took a room in a country town 50 miles to the south. It was a place of antimacassars (crocheted mats to keep hair oil off the chair) and of doilies (crocheted mats to keep plates off the table). I struggled hard to produce a masterpiece. But I knew nothing of life and nothing of writing. I bought an American book on
How to Write Short Stories
but my brain was hazy after manual toil. A dreary sense of failure crept over me.

  I had only one interesting adventure at this place. I was bathing in the river when a flood spate came down. There must have been a deluge from a thunderstorm in the hills, and because the country was new, with the hills stripped of their timber by the settlers, the water rushed down and flooded violently. I have seen a river, which I had crossed on foot without getting wet, become a raging torrent half an hour later, with a thundery rumble from great boulders pounding along the river bed. The spate swept me off my feet and carried me away. I swam to the riverbank, and grabbed at the boulders. The flood tore my grasp and rolled me over and over. I felt panic. My signet ring, with a cornelian stone, was torn off my finger. I resisted panic, which I knew was a killer, and kept swimming, not trying to buck the flood. At last I got into an eddy, and was able to seize a boulder and pull myself out of the water.

Feeling rather a failure, I packed my things and, crossing from North Island to South Island by steamer, I set off for the west coast. This meant crossing the Southern Alps by stagecoach, with five horses. We made our way slowly up the mountain range to the pass, sometimes walking to ease the horses. The glacier-fed rivers were full of milky blue-grey water.

  At Greymouth, on the west coast, I joined my second trade union, the Timber Workers. I got a job at a new mill that was being set up in the bush. To reach it, I travelled on the company's bush railway, running 10 miles into the virgin forest. I worked in the gang extending this railway farther into the forest to get timber out. I liked the bushwhacking, felling trees up to three feet in diameter with an axe. Even digging the cuttings, and laying the track had interest, but it was made dreary because nobody had any incentive and the gang slacked shamelessly. Most of the soil round about was gold­bearing, and I used to amuse myself by panning off some of the dirt in a shovel. Every shovelful would produce a few colours of gold. My mates were a suspicious, dull crowd. They could not make me out, and treated me as if I was an enemy spy. We used to assemble in one of the wooden huts which each of us had to live and sleep in and would swop yarns by the light of the log fire at night, but no one became friendly to me. It was a dreary life, and when I got news of a gold strike in the bush, I packed my swag (that is to say, stuffed my blankets and belongings into a bag which I humped on my shoulders) and made off.

  Ten miles along a track through the bush brought me to a road of sorts, and I kept on walking until I got to the Blackwater Gold Mine at the terminus of another road. The Blackwater was a warm quartz reef more than half a mile below the surface. From here I took off into virgin forest following a blazed trail. I was given directions that would take me to the strike. A blazed trail through dense forests, with a small nick on a tree every fifty or a hundred yards, may be easy to follow if you blazed it yourself, or if you first follow it with someone who knows it but not for a complete stranger to the area. I was trailing up a small creek trying to spot a blaze which would indicate where I had to leave the creek, but I could not find any blaze, and finally mistook a deer track for the right trail. I followed this for some time, but an hour or so later I had to admit that I was well and truly bushed.

  Panic came in a big wave. It was a new overwhelming panic that paralysed my brain; I wanted to tear wildly through the bush. I knew that I had to fight this panic, so I set my whole mind to fighting it, and finally I had control. Then I unpacked my swag and, feeling intensely alone and lonely, rolled up in my blanket and went to sleep. This was beside another stream, which ran over a rusty-coloured bottom, apparently full of new-chum gold which glittered more than the real stuff: it was hard to believe that I was not lying beside immense wealth, though I reasoned that real gold would have worked through the gravel to rock bottom.

  When I awoke at dawn I lay still, pondering, until I had worked over all my movements. If I could get a direction, I ought to be able to hit off the valley from which I had started, even though it was merely a thin streak running into a vast area of solid forest. I had no compass and it was impossible to see farther than a few yards. I decided to try to get a bearing from the sun. The only hope for this was to climb to the top of a hill. This west-coast bush was a rainforest, created by the westerlies sweeping in from the ocean and emptying their moisture as continuous rain for weeks on end as they lifted over the Alps. In places the forest was so dense that, without a slasher, it would take four hours to move a mile through it. From the ground I could not get the least sign of the sun through the dense growth overhead.