Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth, Matthew 5.5
One day, I awoke to consciousness, stiflingly hot in the mattress hollow between the warm bodies of my parents. Pained, shuffling footsteps and a small knock at the door. My grandfather with cups of tea and bread and butter sandwiches, cut in quarters. Pop was bent double and had to raise his head painfully to look at us with his milky blue eyes. That is the first time I remember being at the farm.
Later, I could read the words on the wall sampler in the bedroom. “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.” I liked the sound of that and voiced it in my mind, over and over. I was the fourth child, so was always last in the pecking order when it came to sleeping arrangements. Sometimes I slept on the small divan in Nana and Pop’s dark room – even her hat-pin cushion was black. I was intrigued by her lacing up her pink corsets, which turned her bulky body into a solid, ribbed barrel. She’d wind her wispy strands of grey hair into circles with bobby pins, and contain them with a hairnet.
By this time, grandfather Arthur hardly spoke, and was very deaf. He cut wood all day with a big crosscut saw, and fell asleep over his meals. He was the slowest eater on God’s Earth. He would cut his cold mutton into parallelograms, stare at them, and then drift off mid-mouthful. “Arthur!” Nana would shout in her sharpest tone. These protracted meals were pretty agonising. As it was we had been dragged away from important business in our pretend houses under the massive Lawsoniana hedge that sheltered the house from the bitter Easterly wind. Nana and Pop would then progress to the sitting room for their afternoon sleep, shafts of sunlight stabbing the couch through cracks in the black-out blinds. Everyone had to digest their lunch before we went down to the river to swim. Heaven knows it would have been impossible to drown in such a narrow, shallow part of the river, the banks lined by aunts and uncles and cousins.
In those days, it was a constant litany of prohibition – we were always waiting for something, having to slow down, go to bed, be quiet, shut the gate, eat up, not waste anything, be careful of the skirting boards (it was alright for them to hurt us), not wash our hair, not strain our eyes reading, not play cards or anything enjoyable on Sunday, not giggle at the table, and certainly not think too much of ourselves. Yet, we loved staying at the farm. There was freedom, too. And a great sense of security. Our uncles and aunts and cousins lived just across the paddocks in adjoining farms. Nana put threepences in the Christmas pudding, and ordered the new soft drinks from Mr Staples the Grocer. He wore white aprons and Salvation Army uniform on Sunday. Nana greatly admired the Sallies but couldn’t bring herself to switch codes. They were too a bit too “out there” with their tambourines and racy hymns.
Arthur and Ruth hardly ever left the farm, except to go to Church in Norsewood, three long miles away. The little church was on the cold side of a steep hill, unnecessarily shaded by macrocarpas. Uncle Rex, always on the edge of laughter, winked at us as he pumped air into the dreary Church organ, and cousin David – in sharp white sixties shirt and thin black tie – handed out the hymn books. Mum sang in a reedy vibrato, and always inclined her head to display extra piety. Dad never attended Church as he was an atheist, although I would not have dared make such a shocking suggestion.
Because noone ever went anywhere beyond the far off metropolis of Dannevirke, religious and social attitudes never budged from those that Ruth’s mother Jane brought with her from England in 1875. In one of the few photos of Jane, she is clutching her bible sadly. It wasn’t just a photographic prop. She died in her sixties, on the kitchen table, after an emergency operation. Joseph remarried, a little too soon – Jessie-in-white-boots the family always called her as shorthand insult. It seems Joseph was, as rumour had it, engaged elsewhere while the rest of the family were at Church. Jessie buried Joseph a Catholic, which they could never forgive.
My mother took a vow not to drink or smoke when a girl. She kept it. She was madder with me than she had ever been when I suggested to her that humans were 98% the same as monkeys. She had the same grit as my grandmother. They both gave the little they could afford to charity. Mum had donation envelopes for the lepers and other afflicted groups, like Africans, in her underwear drawer. They were probably in alphabetical order according to affliction. She added small amounts as she could. I think she and my grandparents are the only people I have ever known who actually lived what they believed. Hypocrites they were not. As a result of this oppressive goodness, we took up smoking, drinking, and unsuitable boyfriends just as soon as we could – they were readily available in the Hutt Valley.
Nana and Pop’s farm was at the top of a hill, beside a steep gorge of the Manawatu River. We were astonished to find seashells in its banks, despite being a good hour and a half from the Coast. When Ruth and Arthur first moved there just before the first World War, they lived in a little shed, or whare as they called it, with three small children. Nana had to climb down the very steep bank to the spring a few metres above the river. Their land was a desert of totara stumps. A boatload of Scandinavian migrants had cleared the land and built the railway to Ormondville a few decades before, and if you go down Norsewood “High Street” now, you will see lots of Scandinavian names and artefacts, and pass the odd undiluted blond-haired, blue-eyed descendant. Olsens, Petersens, Gundersens, and other –sens were familiar names to us. If they thought times were hard in Norway and Denmark, they encountered even worse on arrival – plonked down in the middle of an enormous forest it was their task to clear. Toddlers had to be tied to trees so they didn’t get lost. It was some time before they could forge a bullock cart route to Dannevirke to sell their surplus eggs and butter.
When Ruth and Arthur became too old to farm, their eldest son took over. Their youngest son bought the farm next door from a man who won it in a Crown ballot for returned soldiers. Now they have all gone, and my sisters and I own the old farmhouse and one acre. Only cousin David still works on the land – not his own.
Our family history in this country began when Jane, an 18-year-old-dairy maid from Lyneham, and 21-year-old Joseph from nearby Milton under Wychwood, Oxfordshire, made the decision to join other villagers on the great voyage to New Zealand. The agricultural depression drove them out by the shipload. Grain prices plummeted as American imports started flooding Europe. Jane and Joseph married a year after their arrival and settled in Waipawa, southern Hawke’s Bay. I don’t really know who my great grandmother was and how she felt in the end about her move to New Zealand. I had no idea where she came from in England until a distant relative researched the family tree. It was never talked about.
But I do know one thing about Jane, Ruth, my mother, my daughters and granddaughters yet to be born. We belong to the H1 mitochondrial* DNA lineage of about 1000 mothers who go back to a woman living somewhere in southwest Europe (the Dordogne, I fancy) c20,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age. Evolutionary biologists work on a scale of thousands of years, in units of 100s and 1000s of generations, and map the migratory flux of people through progressive DNA mutations. People inherit their mitochondrial DNA, a separate circular piece that powers our cells, including sperm, only from their mother. My long ago ancestral mother developed a new mutation in her mitochondrial DNA which identifies and links all her descendants. We have travelled a long way. We survived – at least long enough to give birth to a daughter.
This project is not a nostalgic family history. Mine is as ordinary and extraordinary as that of any other New Zealander who finally washed up in the last landmass on Earth to be populated. But it is easier to understand historical and current social and economic trends through the life stories of people you know. As our dairy farmers plunge to the bottom of another cycle, with everyone who knows nothing about farming (like me) on their case over water use, pollution, animal welfare and methane emissions, I want to put these events into historical and future perspective. Have we gone full cycle back to the situation that Jane and Joseph found themselves in? The countryside continues to empty as the next technological revolution breaks. Are their descendants, and those of many other hopeful immigrants, members of the new “precariat” – earning minimum wages for making beds and lattes for tourists, with little hope of buying a house, let alone a farm? I know what Paul Callaghan would say if he were alive today.
Glenda Lewis
http://www.eupedia.com/europe/Haplogroup_H_mtDNA.shtml:
Haplogroup H1 is by far the most common subclade in Europe, representing approximately than half of the H lineages in Western Europe. Roostalu et al. (2006) estimate that H1 arose around 22,500 years ago. H1 is divided in 65 basal subclades. The largest, H1c, has over 20 more basal subclades of its own, most with deeper ramifications. H1 is found throughout Europe, North Africa, the Levant, Anatolia, the Caucasus, and as far as Central Asia and Siberia. The highest frequencies of H1 are observed in the Iberian peninsula, south-west France and Sardinia.
The mutation defining haplogroup H took place at least 25,000 years ago, and perhaps closer to 30,000 years ago. Its place of origin is unknown, but it was probably somewhere around the northeastern Mediterraean (Balkans, Anatolia or Levant), possibly even in Italy.
