Turner, Pamela Mary Interview

Today is Wednesday 12th February 2025. I am privileged to be speaking to Pam Turner. Pam, shall we begin by you telling us your life story and the story of your family?

Thank you. I am Pamela Mary Turner; my maiden name was Lewis. The fact that my descendants that [who] I’m going to talk about were also Turners is quite coincidental because we were not related until I married a Turner, which makes recording quite difficult.

Anyway, I was born on 24th January 1940 in Levin. How I came to be born in Levin is a story in itself, because my parents [John and Mary Lewis, née Scott] lived at Puketitiri, which was then a very isolated, mainly forestry area north-west of Napier in Hawke’s Bay. Soon after my parents were married a little boy arrived, and because of very major gynaecological problems my mother was then told that she would never have any more children, so Peter became the cherished heir to the throne. My father then was working in the McLeod & Gardner mill at Puketitiri and also running the farm which my great-grandfather had carved out of bush and tussock to fulfil his ambition of owning his own land.

My great-grandfather was born in Little Driffield in England in March of 1856, and by devious means he came to New Zealand as a nine year old boy, with his parents. They settled in Mangonui in Northland, with the promises of having rich farming land at their feet, but that was a very unreal promise. They then moved down to Thames for the gold mining that was just being developed there, and finally ended up at Turner’s Hill, which is about half way between Paeroa and the Karangahake Gorge. When my great-grandfather, whose name was John Frost Turner, lost his job as a butcher’s apprentice when he cut his hand [he] put a sack over his horse, gathered up his dog – he had £1 in his pocket – and he waved his mum and dad goodbye. He was then eighteen years old, and he said, “I’m going to find a farm.” He set off down the coast and eventually ended up at Te Pohue where he was farming, shepherding, cattle mustering – ekeing out a survival – and he married a Norwegian lady, Gullette Turani Halversen. With the records at that time a lot of the names were just spelt as they sounded, and there are lots of variation spellings for these names, especially for the Norwegian side of the family.

John Frost Turner, my great-grandfather, had been married three and a bit years before the letter he wrote to his parents telling them he was getting married arrived to [was received by] the parents. It was thirty-three years before he actually even got back to see his parents again, and they were then able to meet their daughter-in-law. They settled in a little cottage at Te Pohue, where Gullette was the cook, often cooking for thirty people or more over an open fireplace in a little wee soil [dirt] floored hut. How she kept all her long robes and gowns and corsets clean and dry and ironed while she was labouring to the level that she was is just an absolute mystery. But I do still have the original letters that John Frost sent to his parents, many of them taking over a year to even reach the parents. So that is how my great-grandparents started life; sadly at that stage they lost their first little baby just a few days before Christmas which must’ve been an horrific experience for them.

John Frost Turner used to ride across the back country from Te Pohue to Puketitiri, which was then largely undeveloped, but he secured work there with the shepherds and the landowners, and built up a good relationship with them for his skills in general farm work, his caring for sheep, his horsemanship, his general work ability. When he lost the farm that he was a tenant farmer on at Te Pohue – not his fault, but through the landlord claiming too much in the way of rent – he abandoned everything and took the family by cart to where his wife’s sister was established in Napier. That was no mean journey with his wife and new little baby on this cart to come from Te Pohue; it took them two days to get to Napier. The cart was pulled by bullocks; he had a horse which he tied to the back of the carriage and occasionally he would ride it, but otherwise he walked on the cobbly stone road, [and] fended off the less than scrupulous locals as he passed. He put sackcloth around the feet of the dogs so that their little paws wouldn’t get too badly hurt on the shingle, and that’s how the dusty little family arrived in Napier. He had his three chooks in a little cage on the cart as well. Somewhere they camped over on the road.

He then worked his way northwest along the Apley Road to what is now known as the Apley Station, and he would ride home on a Friday night to see his wife and little girl in Napier, and often when he got off his horse after a week’s hard work on the farm he would have to ease himself and get [out of] his trousers which would be stuck to him with blood from his haemorrhoids. That’s just some of the hardship that that family faced.

Anyway, he worked his way into the hills, and because of the relationship[s] he had with the landowners and the locals around the area, he gradually worked further northwest until he came to Patoka Station which is still in existence. He was working there and also worked at the Hawkestone Station, and built the ‘Iron Whare’ out on the Kaweka Flats. From Patoka Station he somehow obtained a block of land right opposite Balls Clearing at Puketitiri. Balls Clearing as such did not exist in those days; it was simply twenty thousand acres of solid podocarp forest. He pitched, built, strung up his tent system over in the trees by the creek. His wife shifted up with him, by which time they had two little children under three, and made a home in the tents under the bush for about three years. He fenced the tent complex to keep the wild animals off and to keep the children safe. Imagine what it would be like – so near to the water which they needed for domestic duties and for the washing of clothes, right beside the creek bank with two little children running and scampering around everywhere.

He got work in the district as he could; times were very, very hard. He bought his own bullocks and built up a team of eighteen bullocks, and he became the official carrier from Puketitiri down the back road through Hawkestone and Dartmoor to Puketapu. This return trip used to take him four days; he was carting all sorts of things on the bullock wagon – timber and all sorts of goods, back to the locals. He was at that stage the first white settler in Puketitiri. As the district developed because of the milling, often part of his cartage would be the odd barrel of whisky. While he was doing all this he assisted Mr Hughes to carve out the now exist[ing] Puketitiri Road on what is called the Swamp Cutting, using a pick, a shovel and a wheelbarrow, and the older maps still show this section of road as being called the Turner-Hughes Road.

Somehow he also found time to start farming. He had a flock of nine sheep; he put a little bell on the oldest sheep so that it would lead the others and he could hear the bell tinkling, so he knew where they were in all the bush and fern. There was [were] no cultivated paddocks whatsoever. This little sheep became very cunning, and knew that if it stood still in the bushes the dogs would go past it and it would be able to stay free. He also had bells on his cows, but the cows were never quite wise enough to stand still and he could always hear the cow bell tinkling in the bush, and that’s how he found them.

He built the house which I grew up in; he pit-sawed timber, hewed it all out with an adze and built the house from that. He chogged [stopped] up the cracks between the boards with a mixture of clay and water to chog [stop] up the gaps for [against] the draughts, and he used newspaper as wallpaper to line the walls. That was my very first memory, of the draughts coming through the chinks as the builder’s clay shrank, and little ripples would run along underneath the newspaper. I turned these little ripples into all sorts of little fairies, had them named and traced them as they ran across the walls as the draught got under the wallpaper. It was particularly noticeable around the open fireplace. This house was very tiny, but we all survived in it; we all thrived in it. It was a wonderful accomplishment for him, to come from nothing. He had had a maximum of three years of schoolwork … study … before they left England, and when they came to New Zealand there was just no more schoolwork, it was just work, work, work. So he ran his business of cartage, built the house and reared his family, starting from, you might say, nothing.

But getting back to my origins, Mum had been told that she’d never have another child after my older brother, Peter Graham Lewis, was born in 1935. Anyway, four years later along came another little boy, David John, and he proved an absolute asset and blessing to everybody. David was very even-tempered, tolerant and a born farmer – not a scholar, but a born farmer. So the two boys were the family, but Mum was very unwell; she never had good health. She’d always been a [an] undernourished, sad little girl, and she never had good health at all in her life. And she was very unwell when David was seven months old, and went to the doctor. With the news that the doctor gave her Mum walked along the street and sat on a rock in Clive Square in Napier, and cried, the news being that she was pregnant; to have a third child under their impoverished conditions was really the last straw. So that was my entry into the world. She was, as I said, not well at all, and her sister, Edith Feigler, who lived in Levin by then with her husband [who] was a Swiss boy who had jumped ship; she was my mother’s elder sister, but she herself was not well. Her husband was never in employment; he could never hold a job because of his personality. He was a good worker, but he just rubbed the boss up the wrong way every time. And so Mum, with my brother David who was then seven months old, moved into [in with] their family in Levin to look after her elder sister and her two school-age, very young children. Subsequently I was born in Levin on 24th January, just a week before my brother turned a year old. [Mum] stayed with her [Edith] for six months.

Meanwhile, Dad was busy at the house at Puketitiri, working in the mill, trying to get the farm started, with his mother; and built a wash house onto the house, which turned out to be a wonderful asset for my mother, because before that she had been hand washing all the clothes with [in] a concrete tub and an outside copper under the pine trees. So she came home to this beautiful, beautiful room – just a simple lean-to added to the house which contained the two concrete tubs and the copper, and the bath, so this was just wonderful for her to come home to.

I was six months old, and the afternoon she arrived in Puketitiri – Dad had borrowed a car to go to Napier and pick her up from the service car – the snow was so deep there was just the top few inches of the posts standing up above the snow. You could see the first two wires on the fenceline, so that was my introduction as a baby to Puketitiri by which time my older brother, Peter, was five and Mum thought, ‘Well gosh, we’ve got to do something about his schooling.’ Dad was a very bright student, but was so occupied with farm activities and work and trying to keep the place going that he sort of bypassed the schooling side of things. But Mum got Peter established with the Correspondence School, and Peter was a very, very bright boy – too bright for his own benefit, really. He would’ve excelled and could’ve excelled at school, but he diddled away his time and didn’t achieve a great deal; he wouldn’t do the work regularly, he wouldn’t sit at the table long enough to do his work. Probably in modern times he would’ve been described as being ADHD, [Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder] but such a thing was never even dreamed of let alone diagnosed in those days. But Peter never developed anything in the way of social skills and he would not settle with his schoolwork; he would not do it. I think he was nineteen [when] he went to the Boys’ High School and sat School Certificate, which in itself was quite an ordeal. He did pass but only scraped through, and he never really achieved his full potential in life.

Anyway, going back to where I was, which was the start of my life, Dad had built on this wash house, which meant that she [Mum] wasn’t washing out in all weathers, but she still had to carry the clothes in a basket on her hip probably a hundred metres or more out to the long clothes line out on what we called ‘the flat’. Sometimes she’d have to put four or five pegs in to even hold the washing on the line, the wind was so strong. Great-grandfather had called the farm Whistle Hill; this may have been because the northwesterly wind really did whistle over the hills, or it may’ve been because of a beautiful little purpley flower which grew in the sandy places on the farm, which was known as a whistle flower – it’s shaped like a whistle. So that’s how the farm got its name of Whistle Hill anyway, and we still carry on with that name in our family trust.

So there’s Mum, still in bad health, with a little six months old baby, a little boy just eighteen months old, and a very unruly five year old, [and] trying to get him to do his schoolwork.

The godsend to the family then was my grandmother, Dad’s mother, [Minnie Pamella Turner]. She had had her own problems in life … heartaches, heartbreaks … and was a survivor like her parents. She had come back to look after her father [John Frost Turner] with my father, who for all intents and purposes I have since found out was an illegitimate child. But she faced all odds, disadvantages and hardships, and reared Dad to the very best of her ability which in those days could not’ve been easy because most girls just went away to look after an aunt or something while they had [during] their pregnancy, and left the baby for adoption. But Granny was a wonderful person; she was completely non-judgmental, completely non-critical; always there to patch up a grazed knee, to cook a wonderful meal, or quietly be in the background, never interfering, never saying anything. It wasn’t until I started doing family research that I even found out that Dad was illegitimate. I have since been able to find his birth father which [who] is one of three sons; we can’t finally decide which son, but we pretty well know for sure by circumstances who is Dad’s father, and through DNA I’ve now found this person, who is my first half-cousin. So that’s opened whole new channels of everything – I found this out when I had almost finished writing my book on the Puketitiri Pioneer.

So our life [lives] ticked by. Gullette was twelve years older than my great-grandfather and to’ve had three children at her age and stage was pretty remarkable. She never learnt to write or read English, but she learnt to speak it with quite a guttural dialect [voice].

So I grew up in Puketitiri in Hawke’s Bay; we lived in this wooden house that Great-Grandad had hewn from the local bush. The long drop toilet was a story in itself. John Frost Turner had a very great friend, John Whittle, and they used to do a lot of the work together, help each other. And when they met their conversation was always the same; they were both called John, and like gentlemen they always shook hands. “Hullo, John.” “Hullo, John.” “How’re you, John?” “How’re you, John?” “Did yours go?” “Yes, mine went.” They judged the strength of the storm by whether the long drop toilet had blown over or not, and they would decide that, “Yes, yours has gone, so it was a pretty good storm then eh, John?” And that was always their meeting conversation.

The house was small … was only two bedrooms. The sitting room, which was my bedroom and my parents’ bedroom and I shared it with my brother, David. So the four of us slept in the one room which was officially the sitting room. But life revolved around the kitchen, which had a great big wood-burning stove, a sink bench which was never connected to running water, and [a] big long table down the middle with a form on one side and a big long couch on the other side, and you could get twenty people round that table, no trouble. And so it was a blessing that Mum had my granny to help her with the everyday running of the house.

Most of her life my granny had been a professional cook, mainly in boarding establishments and hotels, and she used to cook us the most fantastic hot meals every day. Breakfast was always much the same, porridge; no oatmeal and cereal and stuff in those days. Dinner was always midday – that was a hot meal of meat and vegetables, and the same with tea at night; that was always a hot meal of meat and vegetables. And Minnie did most of this cooking, which freed Mum up to do other housework. Even things like the washing … modern kids nowadays think they’re hard done by if they’ve got to do two loads of washing, and all they do is put it in and press a few switches. But the copper had to be boiled which meant that you had to cart in wood – the right size to fit in the wood box – boil the copper and then put the clothes into the copper, stir them around and get them boiling. Everything had to be boiled, and then you’d ladle them out of the copper with a wooden pot stick into the tub where they would be rinsed and then wrung by hand; rinsed again in blue water to make them crisp and clean and white again, then hand wrung and carried out to the clothes line. So doing these jobs took a lot longer than what they do nowadays.

Minnie did have her own bedroom at the end of the house, which also had an open fireplace in it for warmth. Minnie was Dad’s mother; throughout there’s been a lot of contradiction about her name – she was of course born as Minnie Priscilla Turner, but somehow along the way the Priscilla got changed quite a few times. When she was appearing on one of the census [electoral] rolls for Puketapu her middle name was Penelope, and when she died her death certificate showed her name as Pamella. It was after her that I got my name of Pamela, and there was a lot of conflict with my name for a start … I grew up believing that I had two ‘ls’ in my name, because my parents often would refer to me as Pamella, not Pamela; Pamella. And this happened I think because of discrepancies in the recording of Minnie’s name.

Minnie was a little bit sly, in that she faked her departure from Hawke’s Bay to go to Marton where my father was born, and she even sent her dad a letter saying that she had married; that person did exist but as far as I can tell there was no relationship there, and my great-grandfather may never have known that his one and only grandson was an illegitimate child. It has caused [taken] a lot of research to find all this out, but I now know that the person she said was my father’s father is not so. Unfortunately this name did get into print when my auntie – my mother’s second sister – wrote up a little bit on their side of the family. Mum and Dad, I should’ve said, were second cousins, and that’s how they met and how the relationship formed. But the person that my auntie mentioned in her unprinted book was definitely not my father’s father.

And so our lives developed and grew. There was probably so little in my life at that stage that I can remember right back as a two year old; Mum and Dad were out haymaking with David and Peter with them, and I was put to bed to have an afternoon sleep after dinner, with my granny there to keep an eye on me. When I woke up she dressed me in blue overalls, and I had a big glass bottle full of water tucked under my arm, and she sent me out from the house, remembering I was two years old; and I walked out across the flat, down across a hill, crossed the two-board crossing on the creek, through two fences – I talked to the birds as I went – and eventually found my way to the hay paddock where Mum and Dad were working, and joined the haymaking party.

Also as a two year old was when I first got my interest in birds, which has become a lifelong unpaid occupation for me. Mum had taken me across the Bushy Park farm to visit Mrs Whittle. Mum and Mrs Whittle were great companions … farmers’ wives together … and I suppose they saw each other probably once every six months. Anyway, while the ladies were talking I climbed up on the back of Mrs Whittle’s couch and I stole the little cuckoo out of her cuckoo clock and took it home, supposedly to look after it. I used to talk to this at night when I went to bed, and pretend that I was feeding it and everything. But unfortunately Mum found it when she was making my bed, and knew that Mrs Whittle was frustrated and couldn’t understand why the clock still said ‘cuckoo’, but no cuckoo came out the little hole to say ‘cuckoo’. And of course as soon as Mum saw it she realised, so she made me carry it in my open hand across these paddocks – probably about three kilometres – to present this cuckoo back to Mrs Whittle. So that was my first introduction to caring for birds.

We ticked along; Peter did a little bit of work but not very much. By the time David reached the age of five he was very much an out-farm boy – did not want to sit at the table to do stupid things like schoolwork. So Mum developed a scheme that I would sit on the opposite side of the table and work with him. The teachers at the Correspondence School in Wellington were very understanding about this, and they used to send little things in the way of work for me to do, so by the time I was five I was reading and writing quite fluently. The only problem with my writing was that like my father I was very left-handed, and also like him – who’d been forced to write right-handed – I was persuaded to write right-handed. I think that in today’s terms I would probably be termed dyslexic [ambidextrous] because now if I’m writing on a page I will write with my right hand, but if I’m writing on the blackboard when I was doing tutoring … nursing … I would write with my left hand. And now I can write pretty well as well with my left hand as I can with my right. And I think that with other things I’m so left-handed that I think I was probably persuaded to write right-handed. This did cause problems when we were doing any farming projects or anything, particularly screwing screws – I could never remember whether I went right or left to unscrew or screw up. And Peter being the bright lad that he was used to ridicule me for this and there was a large amount of bullying that went on, to the extent that I learnt quite soon how to avoid conflict by either shutting up completely or disappearing off the scene so that there was no one to have conflict with. I think this has been quite an asset throughout my life, having learnt to do this.

There was the usual run of dogs, cats, lambs, calves, pigs, chooks, pet rabbits; and if we had these things they were always our responsibility to look after and care for. Mum and Dad were humane and kind to us about this sort of thing, but they just didn’t have the time to be fiddling around with us and pets. Peter was given two beautiful dogs; one was a whippet which we used to take out for rabbiting, and the other was a little Australian terrier which Mum adopted as hers. Peter had no interest in animals; he loved cats, but every cat that he had always had a bad temper, which matched his. He had no inclination whatever with lambs or any of the other animals that we had. He never learnt to milk … perhaps that was wise; David and I learnt to milk at quite a young age and we would often get saddled with milking our cows. These were more than just cows for the house; we used to separate the cream, and that was sold to the Heretaunga Dairy Factory in Hastings, being collected once a week from a gateway half a mile down the road from us. Dad, or later Peter, would take the cans of dream down to the gateway to be picked up by the truck. So David and I would be milking cows; I always looked after the pet lambs. The pigs were always my responsibility. The chooks were free range, but it was always my responsibility to find the nests, and find the eggs before they’d been sat on until they were past using. Peter and I had pet rabbits; David only saw a rabbit as a means of getting food.

A lot of our time was spent harvesting, shooting rabbits [with] bows and arrows; shanghais later. As a nine year old I was regarded as being responsible enough to be out shooting rabbits with a .22 rifle. No supervision – I can imagine what Health & Safety would say about that nowadays. David very quickly took to hunting deer – he would disappear with the .303 rifle, an old Ensign postwar firearm, he’d disappear with that; tell me where he was going but just disappear from Mum and Dad and go out hunting, and come back with more venison meat on his shoulders – more than his own body weight he’d be bringing home. Our diet mainly consisted of rabbits, venison and eels. We were always in the creek catching eels in the summer time, ‘cause they hibernated in the winter, and so we became the providers along the way as well.

We never had a car; Dad used to borrow the neighbour’s car, probably annually, to take us to town to go to the dental nurse, which I hated. I was always carsick; couldn’t even get three kilometres down the road to the Post Office and I’d be carsick. Peter used to always say, “Put her head in a paper bag.” These drives to town were always a huge adventure for the boys in particular, but I hated it because of the carsickness. Mum would be in the front with Dad and we three kids would be squished into the back, and I’d be between the two boys and there’d always be fights. I hated it. The road was rough metal; half the time the vegetation’d be crashing onto each side of the car, it was so narrow. And I remember one particular trip … we came round what is now the Patoka cutting, a very sharp hairpin bend, and there was an old sow, a wild sow, laying on her side feeding her umpteen babies, probably ten or twelve of them all hooked onto her having their lunch, or whatever it was. And you never go near a sow with its piglets – they’re extremely dangerous and protective. And I remember sitting there in this hot car, and Dad had his hand out the window and he was tapping the side of the car in frustration, waiting for this old pig to finish feeding her babies. And finally she gave a switch of her tail, and moosh! Got up and walked off into the fern with her babies trailing along behind her.

But the trips used to take probably anything up to four hours or longer to even get to town. We’d rush round, go to the dental clinic, do any emergency shopping, jump back in the car and come back home. We used to be given probably a penny to spend. David never spent any money, he’d go off along the streets with his head down, looking for money in the gutters that he could pick up. I used to always buy an ice-cream. I don’t quite know what Peter did with his, but David was the saver in the family.

We used to get our groceries once every six months; they’d be delivered to the farm from Hughes’ shop which housed everything from a needle to a saddle to a keg of whisky. Everything that you wanted to buy you could get from this shop which was situated at Rissington. Unfortunately this whole building, which was originally just a big house with shelves set up in each room to hold different things, was inundated with silt in the recent Cyclone Gabrielle, a couple of years ago. This building has now been, sadly, completely demolished, and every time you go past you think of what that building held. Every time the groceries were ordered they’d come, and Dad would give the truck driver the money for the bill. And then the next lot of groceries would come and there’d always be a little bag of lollies as a thank you for having paid your bill on time. Mum kept control of those lollies otherwise I would’ve eaten the lot at the time, but David hardly ever ate any – he saved them.

The boys and Mum and I had one holiday in 1946, and Nellie Whittle [from] the neighbour came with us to their beach cottage at Haumoana. This was an eye-opener to us … one, to see the sea, and two, to play in the sand. Swimming was right out of the question ‘cause the sea was regarded as a bit too dangerous, and Mum was never a swimmer so we didn’t go in the water much. So going to the beach with Nellie Whittle was fun, and also quite strenuous.

A little sideline – Nellie was courting at that stage, and Mum was sort of the stand-in mother for her. Nellie was a wonderful entertainer; she was a real light in [at] any party. Although I was only six she jacked it up with me that I would jump into her bed and she would be out with her boyfriend. Anyway, this particular night that she jacked this up she sneaked into bed with me and left her bed empty. Mum did a check on her, and of course whatever the time was, ten o’clock at night or something, and Nellie wasn’t in her bed. And the next morning Mum was going to rap her up properly about staying out. Meanwhile of course, Nellie’d been tucked up in bed with me, and so that one backfired on poor old Mum. They’re [the Whittles] a very well known family from Puketitiri, right back to their great-grandparents, and there’s still descendants of them up there.

During most of my earlier childhood, say up to about twelve years old, with the bullying I received from Peter which always caused problems, I would disappear probably for a whole day at a time, even from about the time I was five. I’d grab a few peas or a few carrots out of the garden – there was always a huge, beautiful vegetable garden which Dad maintained and planted – so I’d grab these peas and carrots and I’d go off into the Balls Clearing Scenic Reserve; often go in the morning. And Mum would come looking for me. Often Mum would be crying in her desperation to find me, and I would hide. And poor Mum would go round the trees calling me … “Pammie! Pammie! Pammie!” And I’d just hide there and never own up that I was there. Poor Mum would go back home, and … imagine the agony she must’ve gone through. But again, we got there.

They boys used to do things together, and I was always the ‘add-on’, I suppose. We had a lot of boys around us, and no girls at all. The Maxwell boys used to come up; the Ramage boys when they were there on holiday used to come over; Whittles always had lovely high school aged boys from town coming up to the farm for holidays, and we used to have these hilarious get-togethers, particularly eeling, and we’d go over to the creek in Bushy Park and all meet up there. And Mum and Mrs Ramage and Nellie Whittle used to bring over tins of baking and we’d have these wild eeling parties round the creek. Nellie Whittle used to always bring rotten eggs which I think she’d stored up probably for a year, and there’d be these egg fights; presumably you’d put the eggs in the water and that would attract the eels, but invariably the eggs went elsewhere. Somebody’d push … or fall into the creek, and we’d be coming home cold and wet and smelling of rotten eggs. But that was part of growing up, I suppose. It used to be wonderful there; I remember the outline of the trees against the moonlight sky, and the moreporks calling in the trees. And out on the farm the cattle’d be laying there, probably over-full, and sighing and chewing their cuds. And sometime at night when it was well and truly dark the adults would gather up the kids – or what was left of the kids – and drag us off home again. But those eeling parties were really, I suppose, our socialisation for the year.

Harvesting was always a good time too, ‘cause all the local farmers used to come in and help everybody with their harvesting. Dad used to go off for days and weeks at a time, coming home at night, helping the neighbours over the fence with whatever they were doing, whether it was harvesting or shearing or whatever.

Dad also inherited from my great-grandfather the ability to be a farrier, and all the district horses used to come to us for shoeing. And in those days of course all transport was by horseback and all farm work was done by horses. It was my job … for a little, tiny thing … to man the forge in the shed where Dad used to do the shoeing. This was a home-made thing that my great-grandfather had made using skins as bellows and a manuka pole as a handle. And the fire used to be in the metal bowl at the end, and my job was to work the lever … the pole … and puff the air into the firebox to keep the embers burning to heat the horseshoes with before they were fitted to the horse’s feet. It was a real art to get the handle operating for a start, ‘cause I was so short and so little that I had to jump on the handle to bring it down. And then of course to push it up to let more air into the bellows, I had to stand on tip-toes and reach right above my head to let the handle go up high enough and keep on puff, puff, puffing to keep the fire going. It was a real art to keep embers in the fire bowl and not have wild flames lashing everywhere. This went on for years, and all the neighbours used to bring their horses to Dad for shoeing. I loved it, partly ‘cause it meant that I could handle the horses as well.

We had three Clydesdale draught horses for our farm work, and one of them was a little bit of a mongrel ill-bred, I suppose – she was very, very small but she had a wonderful temperament, and I learnt to ride … well, I learnt to ride on the Whittles’ donkey first … but I learnt to ride this horse even though she was not a riding horse, she was a work horse. And I used to be able to saddle her up and move her everywhere and do everything with her. Again, Peter never touched the horses, never touched the animals.

Mum got really upset one day when she lost David and found he was out in the sheep yards. By then the oldest mare had just produced a foal, and here’s David putting this mare and the foal down the sheep yards, and drafting them off, such was his instinct of [for] sheep work; drafting them off, and separating the mare from her baby. And she never harmed him, but when Mum saw what he was doing she was too scared to yell out to him in case she frightened the old mare, or David panicked or something went wrong, so she just had to stand at the fence and watch him putting his horses back through the yards again and then separating them, then putting them through the yards again, and … the size of the horse compared to the size of sheep going down the race of course broke down the boarding at the side of the race, so David and I had to do quick surreptitious repairs of the race before Dad found out what had happened. I think Dad probably knew anyway, but he never growled at us over that.

Apart from the chores that I mentioned – the milking which was the big thing – oh, we were milking fifteen cows at one stage, hand-milking them. David would invariably go off hunting and Dad’d be out doing fencing or some work on the farm. And Peter would be absent – don’t ask where, ‘cause no one knew. And I’d end up, particularly at night, milking these fifteen cows on my own. I quite loved the old cows; there were one or two that … our personalities clashed, but mostly they were just hybrid cows. And I remember very clearly leaning my head against the flank of a cow, tired at night at the end of a day, and I’d be listening to the kiwis out in the bush, just running round doing what kiwis do. I don’t think many people have the opportunity of doing that these days.

Dad had a particular aversion to blood, although he was a very competent butcher; that was another sideline that my great-grandfather had taught him. With Dad being illegitimate and being brought home to the farm as a seven year old, Great-Grandfather was the father influence in his life, and he taught Dad many, many skills which was the father’s responsibility to teach their son in those days.

Bur Great-Grandad had taught my father the butchery trade, because when he had his own bullock team part of his income was [from] selling meat. He would go out onto the Kaweka Flats for a week at a time, just with his horse and a little bag of rolled oats and a little bag of salt, and he’d stay out there for a week shooting the wild bulls with his own muzzle loader firearm. He said in one of his letters to his mother what a dirty, dangerous job it was. Gullette of course would be left with the three children, running the house as she could and milking the house cows; doing what she could do to keep the farm going while he was away. He never had a timepiece with him, but she used to mark the days off on the calendar, and exactly a week later he would come home with his horse laden with wild bull meat. And he’d then butcher it up – he built his own butcher’s shed – and take it around the district, selling it for about a shilling [1/-] a pound, which for the amount of work involved in getting it was just blood money.

This shed that he built for his butcher shed – I’m diverting here – had an eighteen foot stud and an endless chain from the roof down onto the concrete floor, which he had mixed and made himself. I mean, making concrete in those days … how he got the skills to do it I don’t know; the whole floor was gently sloping so that the blood would run down into one corner and out into a collection tray. And when it had coagulated he used to scoop that up and put it in a drum and used it either for compost for the garden or for an additive for the chooks’ food. We used to use the leftover skim milk and provide curd for the chooks as an addition to their normal diet.

Dad carried on a lot of things that Great-Grandfather had taught him to do, and this followed on then to my brother, David, who inherited the farm. David remained in the old crofter style of calling the sheep instead of droving them. He would sit up on top of a hill with his one little dog beside him. You could call the sheep and they would come to you to go through the gate into the next paddock or wherever you wanted to take them. A lot of people laughed at David over this – he was a very private person and lived a very private life. Unfortunately neither of my brothers got married, so I never had any sisters-in-law.

Another gimmick we used to get up to as kids was to make our own skating rink. On frosty nights, if you picked the time of night when it was after dark and carried buckets of water down a little sloping hill that went down into the creek, and if you let the bucket overflow and flow down this slope, it used to freeze as it flowed down. And we used to call this our skating rink, and you could stand at the top in your boots and slither and slide and skate down to the water’s edge; sometimes we misjudged and went right into the water, which didn’t really thrill Mum very much.

With this creek that ran right beside the house – it was quite a short creek but it was both an education and a horror to us. Peter deliberately tried to drown me in it – twice, actually. [Chuckle] When I was six months old Mum used to put me out in the pram out in the garden of an afternoon for a sleep. And apparently at that stage I never cried … made up for it later, but [chuckle] she used to watch through the kitchen window, and when she could see the pram jiggling she’d know I was awake and go out and bring me in. But this particular time the pram wasn’t jiggling, and she thought, ‘Well, Pam’s sleeping there a long time … I wonder what it is’, and she went down to the pram and the blankets were folded back and the pram was empty. She panicked of course, and then heard a squeak or a commotion or something, and Peter had me down by the creek – this is in winter; there was snow on the ground so I’d’ve been six months old – had me by the feet and I was completely undressed and he was attempting to get me in the water without getting himself wet. That was the first time.

The second time was when he had me in a little cart at the top of a hill. And he’d dug a series of roads down the side of this hill and set off from the top of the hill with the cart and then let it go. And of course cart and Pam went careering down the hill and into the dam at the bottom … turned upside down over me. And I remember this quite clearly [chuckle] … I was on my knees with the cart over my back, and my head was just above the water which was coming up inside the cart. The cart was too heavy for me to get it off me; anyway, dear old brother, David, came to the bank of the creek and was able to reach out and give the cart a kick which got it off my back and I could stand up and go into Mum … sobs, and stories of mud and creek and everything else. Peter ran away for the day, and of course by the time he got home at night they were busy finishing off the milking, and getting tea and everything else, and not too much was said about it, [chuckle] but I remember that lot quite clearly.

What age would you’ve been, Pam?

I’d’ve been about seven then. We used to build huts, too, usually using manuka. I think probably from the influence of my great-grandfather through Dad, somehow or other I’d learnt to thatch, the same as I learnt to plait. And we used to thatch the rooves of the huts with manuka. They were quite useful little places – David and I sometimes used to go out and sleep in them; we’d officially go to bed and then we’d sneak out at night and go and sleep in the huts; come back in the morning so Mum and Dad thought we’d just got up. I mean, when you get to about eight, nine year[s] old parents don’t go checking on you – well, our parents didn’t, anyway – they send you off to bed and they assume you go to bed. They know there’s no media to distract you so they think you’re going to bed to sleep.

Anyway, we also played with bows and arrows; they were lethal. Peter taught us how to pound Number 8 fencing wire into an arrow point and then cut little barbs on the side of it and bind them into the ends of toetoe stems. We used to make our own bows … lancewood are [a] very supple wood … we used to get lancewoods and bow [bend] them into a bow with twine. They were quite successful for shooting rabbits.

And then we somehow progressed on to shanghais – lethal weapons; I think this again was Peter’s leadership. Peter was a tremendous reader, as Dad was. We used to – or Peter did – hop up on the sheds and pinch all the lead moulding around the tops of the sheds. And we’d melt up this lead and we used Great-Granddad’s bullet maker, which he used for his muzzle loader firearm, and make these balls of lead and use them in the shanghais. Well again, [chuckle] Peter succeeded in giving me concussion from hitting me on the head with that and knocking me out completely with a shanghai bullet. We used to go out and have these Indian wars at night in the dark, or in the moonlight was better. We used to get the white stones off the metal road and cherish them as missiles to go in the shanghais.

When I had the concussion of course, I was pretty dopey for a week or so … headache and totally miserable. And I sat at the table one morning to start my school work, and Mum growled at me about having my hair dishevelled, uncombed and unbrushed and everything, and she grabbed the comb to comb my hair and of course the comb wouldn’t go through my hair because of the blood in it from my head injury. [Chuckle] Peter was quick off the mark and said, “Oh, yeah, the other night when she was out getting the cows in she fell down the bank – she didn’t want to tell you.” So that one passed, and I got over my concussion and carried on.

We always seemed to have boys at home; Mum’s baking was a huge attraction, and Mum was a lovely motherly soul. Everybody … everybody loved Mum, and everybody came to Mum with their problems. And we always seemed to have boys around, but there was [were] never any girls. There were just no other girls around the district, or if there were they were chaperoned, and not allowed to run round the world like these boys were.

We used do all sorts of things … climb trees, and just generally have kids’ fun, I suppose. One boy in particular was very, very kind and looked after me … Willy Maxwell. He had enormous big hands; when he started playing rugby he could easily hold a rugby ball in one hand, and you wouldn’t know that he even had the ball in his hand. He had huge hands, and I remember him in particular – one time we raced off down past the creek, and the boys all ran over a single log across the creek, which was quite deep. None of us could swim, of course, and I hesitated. I suppose I was about nine, and Willy came back and he extended this huge great hand across to me. He used to call me Pammie … he’d say, “You’re all right, Pammie.” And I took this huge great hand and he just whipped me across the creek as though I didn’t need to walk on the log. Things like that sort of stay with you, I suppose, because there was possibly little in our life [lives] to distract us.

I grew up wearing my brothers’ cast down outgrown clothing, and also their boots. I can remember Dad bought me a pair of boots when I was probably about eleven, and I was so proud ‘cause I had black shiny boots. But otherwise I just wore what the boys grew out of; no complaints – I mean, it was life in those days, and lots of other kids were doing the same, no doubt.

I think further back I started to say about Dad’s aversion to blood, although he was a good butcher. He could humanely disperse [dispose of] animals; he was always very careful with his shooting, too, to humanely shoot an animal, and never leave an animal injured, or even animals that were ill, he would humanely shoot them rather than let them suffer. But if any of us kids got hurt and bled, he would just go unconscious as quick as a flash. He just couldn’t stand the thought of any of us being hurt, or … yeah, the sight of human blood. One time Dad and I were out mustering which involved quite a long walk out the back; no grass paddocks then, just scrub and fern, wild pigs; and I slipped on a rock and quite badly cut my knee. The blood was everywhere, and I remember taking Dad’s hat down to the creek to fill it with water to bring back to put over him to wake him up, or give him to drink, I can’t remember – but anyway, all this blood pouring down my leg and here’s me staggering off down to the creek to get him water to revive him. And then I just wrapped the wound up with a flax leaf and we carried on mustering. Just the way you did things in those days.

But having visitors – it was always quite a rare occasion. We very seldom had any visitors; the neighbours once in a while used to come. There was Edwin McBurnie – he used to come from another neighbour. When they moved in they were probably our nearest neighbours; they were nearly a mile away. It always meant of course the fire was always going. Dad lit the fire of a morning when he got up, and put the last chock of wood on the fire when he went to bed at night. He was always first up and last to bed. There was always boiling water on the stove and it didn’t matter what hour of the day or night a visitor did turn up, there was always a cup of tea, a cup of soup or a hot meal. Both Granny and Mum were expert scone makers, and there was always food at any hour of the day or night which meant of course that David and I, sitting at the kitchen table to do our school lessons, had to pack everything up and push it aside while the visitors were there. We loved it; we loved visitors coming … well, I did, anyway; David being shy, would take off and go outside, and do something outside until the visitors had gone. But for me it just meant a break from schooling and … yeah, a different face to look at.

Now we can get onto the dreaded subject of education, I suppose. It wasn’t dreaded for me because I loved it – I loved learning. I read tremendously; had an unlimited supply of library books from the Correspondence School. All our work of course was read, and then written answers – no computers, no communication at all. And having started school as a four year old I suppose I had a bit of a head start on the others; anyway, I caught up with David and we did our work together. We were both sort of at the same level although he was almost that year ahead of me. Years in those days didn’t count for schooling, it was what you achieved at school that you’d be promoted on to the next class. And so David and I worked at the same level right through from Standard 1 until we went off to Napier to sit School Certificate together. Mum got David in as a temporary boarder at the Napier Boys’ High School, and she got me into the [chuckle] Randall House Orphanage up on Napier Terrace, and I walked across to Napier Girls’ High School to sit my School Certificate subjects. That’s another whole story, as it was a hideous ordeal for me.

But during our schooling with Correspondence, David was very, very good at drawing and map making … he was a very artistic little guy, whereas I was good with the blurbing and the writing. And so we used to swap our subjects; I’d write out his stories on rough paper and then he’d just write them in in his own writing. And he used to do my paintings; and the teachers never knew. David was always getting extremely high marks for his writing, and coming from a boy that was pretty terrific; and I got highly commended for my artwork.

Mum coped with Correspondence schooling in the house for seventeen years … no wonder she went grey early; no wonder she had bad health. Trying to keep Peter to task was just about impossible; David was not interested in schooling one little bit – all he could think of was getting out and farming. He taught himself to shear; Dad couldn’t teach him ‘cause Dad was left-handed with his shearing and everything was wrong way round, so David basically watched Dad shearing and converted everything else into his own hand and learnt to shear – he became a very good shearer and was well sought after in the district to go out onto the different farms to help with shearing tasks.

Going back to our schooling, three visiting teachers came to our house in that seventeen years of Correspondence schooling. Mum used to take us over to the McBurnies to listen to the Correspondence School annual break-up. I don’t think Peter ever went; David went under protest, and I loved going ‘cause I used to hear my name read out at prize-giving.

Was that over the radio?

Yes, over the radio – we actually didn’t have a radio until … probably I was about eleven, I think, and Peter got an old radio from somewhere but it was battery operated, and the battery always seemed to be having to come to town to get charged up again. And Peter controlled what we listened to, so we never really grew up with radio.

The phone came into use in 1954; we were then on a party line of eight people, and we were rung up by a code – ours was one long ring and two short rings, and when the phone rang to that we could pick it up and answer. The phone only operated nine to five Monday to Friday anyway, and [chuckle] there was a neighbour down the road on our party line who they suspected was eavesdropping on phone calls. She was a very sweet lady, but a little bit intellectually deprived. And Mum and Mrs Whittle were having a chat on the phone line one day and Mrs Whittle said to my mother, “Oh well, Mrs Lewis” – they never called themselves by their maiden [christian] names – “just between you and I and down the road, such-and-such”, and there was [a] clap and this voice came on – “I am not listening to the phone!” And down would go the receiver. [Chuckle] It was fairly obvious she was listening to the phone. Just another way of keeping occupied in the country.

And the power came to us … we got the power in 1972, by which time of course I’d long left the farm, anyway.

We’ll digress a little bit and go back to 1949; Dad had always promised Mum a new house. And of course Dad had his own problems with health also; and Minnie, our beloved granny, died. And that created huge problems because Dad had to pay death duties, which was a colossal amount of money in those days – thousands of pounds, not dollars – pounds – which just about took us off the farm, trying to cope with the expense. There was never a lot of money anyway, but having to pay death duties when Minnie passed away was just the final straw, and things very nearly did collapse. Dad became very depressed and spent most of his time out hunting. Mum was trying to cope; Peter was not co-operative – it was a very, very hard time.

Dad had cut up one of the logs that was left lying in the paddock from the remnants of the bush – Balls Clearing – and shaped them into piles. In 1949 on my birthday he put in the first pile to be the beginning of the new house. And things progressed gradually, slowly, a bit at a time. He was taking outside work, trying to shear for neighbours; build up a few pounds here and there.

Peter was given the opportunity to attend a Correspondence Summer School at … Massey College in those days … and somehow they got enough – or feigned [wangled a] proper school uniform, ‘cause the boys even had to wear caps in those days, knee length socks, proper uniform. So Peter went off to Massey College for Correspondence Summer School camp; was a naughty boy, got sick, ended up in the hospital; came back, sadly with [a] bad thing of community living. He taught us a few naughty games, such as how to give Chinese burns which he used to do on my wrists. He did teach us how to play rounders, but of course there was only three of us for the team anyway, and the boys could always hit harder and faster and further than I could, so I was always at the bottom of the team. Yes, that was quite devastating when Peter came back; he didn’t gain from that.

A few years later of course it came [to] David’s turn to go to Correspondence School camp. David didn’t really want to go, but Mum and Dad thought it would be beneficial for him, and he could inherit Peter’s uniform, anyway, so they dragged that out of mothballs. And David went off to Massey College and immediately was made deputy head prefect. He was put in charge of taking a group of boys to the Palmerston North Show; David had never been to a Show in his life before and was completely out of his depth. These three other boys that he was in charge of were only his own age … were sophisticated little lads who knew their way around society and immediately ran away and left poor David parading the Showgrounds looking for them, terribly devastated that he’d failed in his duty of looking after these little wretches of boys. [Chuckle] Anyway, all was done [well] – no teachers growled at him or anything; he got the boys back in time to get on the bus, get back to Massey. They’d done it on purpose of course, ‘cause they were … they were well schooled up. They knew where they wanted to go and to show him what they wanted to see. Poor David didn’t have a clue.

And then of course it came [to] the girls’ turn to be at Massey College. And David also ended up quite ill in the Palmerston North Hospital [through] no fault of his own. And when he was going to Massey, I said to Mum, “Well I hope David doesn’t get sick or it’ll spoil my chances of going.” And David never talked very much about it, but it was a very eye-opening experience for him. Because he was such a good all-rounder he got glowing reports of leadership, and all these nice things said about him, but he never told us very much about Massey at all. And then of course he ended up sick in the hospital anyway. And [chuckle] that just put paid – I never got my chance to go to Massey College which I was quite desperate about. I think I wanted to be quite social but didn’t quite know how to be, and of course there was [were] no others to socialise with anyway.

When David went to the Boys’ High School to sit his Correspondence schooling [School Certificate] it was a huge ordeal for him. As I’ve said before, he was not an academic, but he strived; he really tried hard. He scratched [scraped] through which was a real credit to him and a credit to Mum for helping him through his schooling the way she did.

My experience of going to the Napier Girls’ High School to sit School Certificate was sheer hell. For a start, Mum had put me into one of her dresses; I don’t think I’d even been out of boys’ clothing all my life. And I had this awful old pair of sandals on my feet and I had to walk from Napier Terrace over to the Girls’ High School. Got there in plenty of time – I knew about punctuality – and I saw this beautifully manicured little girl in school uniform on the street just behind the Girls’ High School; beautiful little dapper blonde. I went up to her and in my stumbling, fumbling way I told her who I was and why I was at the Girls’ High School. She tossed her blonde hair and said, “What’s that to me?” Walked through the back gate, ‘cause she was obviously the milk monitor; shut the gate behind her and walked off up the steps to the school. And I felt devastated! That another person could talk to me like that – ‘what’s it to me?’

Anyway, I went round the front of the school and there were what seemed like thousands of kids; found the classroom somehow that I was to be in to sit English, walked into this classroom [and] there was the beautifully presented adjudicator sitting at a desk at the front of the hall. And these kids came in – they were all sitting at their individual desks. Some of them started to cry when they opened the papers and saw the questions and didn’t know them; some of them got their heads down and started writing; some were eating lollies. And to be in a room of other people like that … I was lost! I remember sitting there looking at a sparrow that came onto the windowsill ‘cause we didn’t have sparrows at Puketitiri at that stage, and I sat there just looking at this sparrow, and then I thought,’Crikey! I’m meant to be sitting an exam.’ One thing I had learnt through Correspondence School was how to read a question and how to write an answer. So I read the questions and I wrote the answers. And then when I came out all the other classes had finished their three hour exam anyway, and they were all in this quadrangle. Some were laughing, some were crying, they were clutching each other – they were doing what ordinary normal young people do … commiserating, congratulating, swapping stories, swapping lollies, swapping notes. I stood on the tope of the steps and no one knew I even existed – I didn’t mean a thing to anyone. [Chuckle] And I was in one of Mum’s dresses – it was terrible. That left a lifelong impression on me, and from then on I’ve never really got along very well with girls. [Chuckle] I mean, I’ve had plenty of girlfriends and things, and visitors, but never … never really attached to a girl as a girl friend. So that concluded schooling.

The new house was built in dribs and drabs along the way. Mum and I moved up to what we called the new house, which was just up the hill and across the creek, about 1953. I did my school work up there; David didn’t – David stayed at the old house doing his school work. We had slightly different subjects then, ‘cause he chose an agricultural course to do for high school, and I chose dressmaking, which I had hated doing as sewing in the primary school, ‘cause the boys didn’t have any equivalent. Sewing in the primary school was one of the compulsory subjects, and I hated doing that. But I took up clothing for high school, and one of the requirements was to make nine garments which carried fifty percent of the final exam for clothing. And the old treadle machine of course, which had to be hand threaded, and you had to turn the wheel backwards to do a reverse stitch. All it could do was one straight line of stitching, nothing fancy. My daughter has still got that sewing machine actually, in her house.

David did some beautiful work with his woodwork; [a]gain, he had inherited Dad’s ability to do this sort of thing. So anyway, between Dad and David and I and Peter on the sidelines, we built the house, which is now still a haven on the farm. And Peter moved up when he was home, which was not very often; and then Dad and David moved up when the old house was finally sliding down into the creek. The house … we’ve got [it] now – I had it changed a little bit and finally finished in 2000, actually; David died in 1999 when he was just sixty, so I had the back of the house changed a little bit. I had a shower put in and a room made for a washing machine and that sort of thing, and got the house updated. I finished all the stuff in the house that had not been done; a lot of the rooms had never been painted; floors covered, put in a wood burner stove, put in a new kitchen sink and got rid of the boiler from the old wood burning stove ‘cause by now we had the electricity [for] hot water; did the house up properly, so now it’s an absolute haven to my six grandkids, who can’t get up there quick enough to be there.

It’s still in the family?

Oh yes. My grandkids are sixth generation; we’ve kept the farm in the family. David of course did a wonderful job farming it – from my great-grandfather’s nine sheep to the time he died, it was farming three thousand [and] had all the paddocks broken in. I have since had riparian strips put along some of the creeks, and towards the latter part when David’s health was failing I was up at the farm much more, and we fenced off regenerating patches of bush. Yes, so I took over running the farm for quite lengthy intervals when he was either in hospital or ill. And then I went back to the farm for the last stage of his life. I nursed him up there until he became paraplegic; he had cancer and it affected his spine. When I couldn’t cope any longer running the farm and nursing him as a paraplegic, I brought him to town and nursed him until he died in 1999.

I finished schooling in 1997. [1957] I’d had quite a few hitches with rheumatic fever, and bad health and stuff so my School Certificate was delayed for a year because of missed schooling. Yes – I had a few health hiccups and lost quite a bit of time in schooling; sat School Certificate in 1957 and just carried on with general farm work, mainly helping Dad and David.

David by which [this] time had been called up for his military training in the army [and] was very, very successful. While David was at Linton Military Camp, he was in charge of the Bren gun, doing field infantry training up in the Tararuas a lot. He refused promotions which he was offered many times in the army. He enjoyed going to the army for his rehearsal [compulsory military] training every year, and regarded that as a holiday – he was stationed mostly at Waiouru. And what finally put him off from going was when he was pleaded with to form a security guard of honour for royalty visiting. David didn’t like publicity so he quit the army, which sort of cut out really what was his annual holiday.

Anyway, I stayed on the farm. I was too young … I had decided by then that I wanted to go maternity nursing. Had there been more choices for a young girl at that stage I think, if I’d had the brains, I probably would’ve followed up and become a vet. [Veterinarian] But anyway, there were so few choices for women in those days, it was either marry the guy over the back fence, become a secretary or receptionist, go nursing, or go teaching. And I decided … well, I didn’t know too much about nursing, although Mum did try to impart into me, you know, basic nursing care … but anyway, I decided I’d go maternity nursing.

In what year, Pam?

So that was 1958 … the October 1958; 6th October I said goodbye to the farm and came to Hastings Hospital to become a maternity nurse. Again, I knew how to read questions and how to put me head down and answer questions, so I flew through the training. I did find the practical side very hard trying to mix with girls – I wasn’t into their social way of life. All of them had to wash their hair at exactly the same time every week or whatever, to look fine for boyfriends. Boys to me were just a cussed nuisance round the place.

Anyway, of course having grown up on the farm with tramping and running around in the bush all the time, I was able to continue this by joining the Heretaunga Tramping Club. I already knew the president and a few of the important names in the Tramping Club, ‘cause they’d been out at the farm and they’d always come into us to talk about Balls Clearing Scenic Reserve. This reserve had by then well become a part of our family. Great-Grandfather’s one sadness about falling [felling] the bush to make a farm was that all these magnificent trees were getting felled, and he really was the pioneer to starting Balls Clearing Scenic Reserve as a reserve. You know, he fenced as much as he could and kept his stock out of the remaining remnants of the bush that were left, which is now the current reserve. And the preservation of this reserve was handed down through our family, which now I am handing down to my grandchildren.

Anyway, I joined the Heretaunga Tramping Club, and they took me [to] wonderful places; and they really were a home from home for me. They took me into their homes and got me out of the hideous confinement of the nursing [Nurses’] Homes. The nursing hostels were so … old fashioned, I suppose … well, they weren’t old fashioned at the time, it was just [the] current thing; but you had to be in your room by nine thirty at night, lights out at ten. They came round [and] did room rounds on us; had to sign a book if we were going out of the building as to where we were going, when we were coming back … just generally looking after young maidens, I suppose, because on the other side of the fence there’d be all the sailors from the Napier port coming over, looking for a night out. So I suppose the old matron did have her responsibilities; I mean an eighteen year old girl then was not as free as eighteen year olds are nowadays.

Anyway, I got through my exams pretty easily. I knew how to work; I knew how to be punctual. I tried to be kind to everybody, and that all stood [me] in good stead. And I suddenly thought, ‘Well, maternity nursing’s only half way – I’ll do general nursing training.’ So I got accepted, popped off down to Palmerston North Hospital [and] got six month[s] taken off my training because I was already a qualified maternity nurse. [I] joined up with the Palmerston North Tramping Club, which kept me sane; got a motorbike, tootled around here, there and everywhere, did my own thing.

[I] passed all the exams … I was second in New Zealand in the final exams, qualified as a registered nurse [and] carried on there as a Staff Nurse. By then I was able to do a few naughty things with student nurses as students always do. Instead of going for tea at night when we were on night shift, some of us used to pop down to the hydrotherapy pool in the Physiotherapy Department and have a swim – we got pimped on one night, but because I was big and tall I could hop over the half wall frame and get out and get into a uniform – wet – and get back and get to my ward without getting caught. The sad thing was I left my petticoat hanging up on the hook in the cubicle, and the matron – who had to be strict as all matrons had to be – advertised that she had this petticoat belonging to somebody, and if they wanted to claim it to go and get it, and I knew that if I went to claim my petticoat she’d know who the culprit was. [Chuckle] So I lost a petticoat out of that lot. But we had had innocent fun, just good fun I suppose, but again I related more to the Tramping Club than I did to my fellow nurses. The matron and I were not seeing eye to eye.

I was on the committee for the Nurses’ Ball, and it was no fault of my own [mine] but the car I’d gone with [in] – I’d filled in for one of my nursing mates [who] had a bloke that wanted a blind date to go to the ball, so I filled in – and after the ball was when the fun started. They went into their in-house party to do what you do at a party, and I sat in the car and waited for them which of course meant that I missed room rounds getting back. Got reported for being out after hours at [the] Nurses’ Ball, which I was aggrieved about ‘cause I’d been sitting in the car waiting for these wretched party-goers to come back and take me home. And [a] few other things – oh, the matron didn’t approve of me hanging out my tent to dry where it could be seen by the public; she didn’t approve of me going out and spending nights out in the bush. We generally were on different wavelengths, I suppose. She meant well.

Do you recall her name?

Yes, I do recall her name. [Laughter] This was at Palmerston North Hospital. She was old school, and the interesting part was that I nursed a soldier who had been in the trenches with her at the time of the war, and she was a little maiden in those days, she wasn’t a matron. Anyway, those stories remain hidden, but what she was trying to prevent her nurses from doing was exactly what she had done.

I saw fit to further my nursing education so I applied to do midwifery in Auckland, and I got accepted. I was under twenty-four then, and when I took in my resignation to the matron, she more or less, in her terms, called me a fool and an idiot – I was far too young; I would never be [accepted] in a place like that to do midwifery. So I stood there with my hands behind my back, and I said, “Well, Matron, I’ve already been accepted.” So that just drew another line between us. What I didn’t know until afterwards was that she had me in line to run what would’ve been the first intensive care unit hospital. So I blew that through … I suppose lack of communication between us. She had me eyed up to take what would’ve been a fantastic position, ‘cause I … I loved the intensive care nursing.

Do you regret that now?

Oh – it’s over now; I enjoyed my midwifery. Again, I joined the Auckland Tramping Club, and had quite a lucky escape there with them. They had a bus, and they were going to do quite an extensive trip on the Coromandel Peninsula. And I was to go on this trip but I was late getting off duty and they left without me. And the bus crashed on the Coromandel Peninsula – no one was killed but a few were hurt. I wasn’t on the bus.

But during my training I had some amazing experiences; Palmerston [North], again I was reliable, I was punctual, I kept my head about me doing emergency things; and I was given pretty well all the flights then with the medical aircraft, doing flights to the different hospitals. We flew up to Rotorua; we flew to Gisborne; went by ambulance to New Plymouth; to Wellington. In those days they didn’t have their trained personnel like they have now – I used to get grabbed if I was off duty and taken on these trips, which I just excelled in … I loved.

Again, doing midwifery in Auckland I was the lucky one that … lucky perhaps … got a trip on the hydrofoil across to Great Barrier Island to a maternity case, which was [chuckle] stressful, but it was an experience. I get to the door of the house and there’s crying women everywhere, blood all down the hallway and mother laid out on the bed. “Where’s the baby then?” Tears … Oh, there was an Alsatian dog involved. And I tracked the trail of blood up the hallway, and there’s poor baby still head first in the toilet! [Chuckle] I shouldn’t laugh, but now it seems unreal – picked little baby out, wiped it’s little face on the bottom of my uniform, and it took a breath. Took it back to the hospital and we had an incubator and Mum in bed, and everything was fine. Got my trip on the hydrofoil – the only time I’ve ever been on one.

And then I came back … I was sort of commissioned to come back to the Hastings Hospital to midwifery. I deviated there because the matron at Waiapu House had not had a holiday in twelve years, and I knew the secretary out there who pleaded with me to go and take charge of Waiapu House while the current matron had a holiday. [It] was supposed to be for two weeks; she went over to the Islands and had such a lovely time that she wanted a bit longer, so I think I was there for two months. I enjoyed the old folk – change of pace; I enjoyed them.

But yeah, came back to the Hastings Hospital and carried on there as their senior midwife. I suddenly thought … it was a toss-up as to whether I’d do the premature infant course that was available in Auckland, or do Plunket Nursing. And I wanted to go to Dunedin, ‘cause it was near the Alps for tramping [and] climbing. So I hopped off down to Dunedin and did my Plunket training. Again the old matron and I didn’t see eye to eye. She didn’t think that a girl should go out … I mean, I was what? Twenty-six by then. She didn’t see that a girl should go out with a tent and camp under a tree somewhere. And again she was old school, and we had to sign a book when we were leaving the Nurses’ Home, and write in the book where we were going to be for the night. And I didn’t know; I was going up Central Otago but I didn’t know where I’d be that night, and I just put ‘Under a tree’. And [chuckle] she strongly disapproved and called me to the office, and I said, “Well I don’t know where I’ll be” – this is the winter time – “I’ll be out camping somewhere. I might camp if I get tired driving, or I might camp if I see a pretty place and I want to stay.” And anyway [chuckle] she rang my mother, from Dunedin … rang my mother and said, “Your daughter is going out and doesn’t know where she’s going, but she’ll be camping under a tree.” And my mother said, “Oh, good on her, she’ll love that!” She said, “That’ll be wonderful for her.” That was the sympathy she got. Anyway, we didn’t perhaps see quite eye to eye, but I qualified with Plunket – sat the exam and passed it no hassles.

Had a taste of South Island climbing by then; got in with the Otago Tramping and Mountaineering Club, and I was one of the few people in those days that [who] had a car. So we used to fill my car with students from either the medical school, or the university, or the veterinary school or somewhere; roof rack on top filled with our packs and our ice axes and our crampons, and take off somewhere, pretty well all over you could get over. One interesting trip I had there was with them up the Old Man Range behind Roxburgh. We were in a snow cave, and [chuckle] there was a bit of a roar and a crash and a thunder in the night, and the stars suddenly appeared. There’d been an avalanche and half the side of the snow cave had gone; instead of being in the snow cave we were half in the snow cave, and half on the snow. It wasn’t snowing. Yeah.

And then I thought, ‘Well, better do something with my climbing experience.’ By then I was an associate member of the New Zealand Alpine Club anyway, so came back, continued with all my tramping and climbing and stuff. Again, two of us hadn’t come back from a trip; we’d been waylaid by the remainder of the party, and a whole group of us spent a night camped on the shores of Lake Tarawera after we’d climbed Mount Tarawera. And one young boy, who simply was a tramping companion nothing romantic or anything attached – this boy’s mother hit the roof ‘cause he wasn’t home, and she rang my mother. And my dear mother said, “Oh well, if Trevor’s away with Pam he’ll be perfectly safe – he’s not in any danger at all. If they’re away together he’s perfectly safe – don’t worry about him.” Which wasn’t the answer that this mother wanted. Anyway, we duly got home safely; there was no risk and no problems … nothing.

And then I lead a party of trampers – it was in the days when the private people were allowed to cross the Milford Track without becoming one of the tourist party members. And they called us freedom campers, and we had to wear wristbands to distinguish us from the tourist people; so I led a party across the Milford Track by default as the leader had problems and couldn’t carry out his commitments. That went very well, and by then I thought, ‘Well right – let’s bite the bullet.’

And the next year I took a party of seventeen across the Southern Alps. We went in at Mount Cook and came out at Welcome Flats, just south of the Franz Josef Glacier. That was a fantastic trip; the largest party that had ever crossed the Alps at once – yeah, just a fantastic all-round trip; I handpicked the party as to who was available and who was willing to go. Unfortunately there were no other girls available to go. And one boy was not too long out of high school – he had a very unhappy childhood, [a] very unhappy time at school. And the others in the party said to me, “Don’t take him, Pam, leave him home. Don’t take him.” Anyway, I had this one vacancy; I bit the bullet and I took him, and it has changed that person’s life … it has absolutely changed his entire life, that one experience. We had our moments; he got over-excited going up the Pass and he opened his pack to pull out his camera, take this dramatic photograph. He’d left the Welcome Flats hut at four o’clock in the morning to get over the Alps in time before the avalanches, and his sleeping bag went down the ice slope and into a crevasse. So anyway, two of us [?] looped down and got it out of the crevasse for him and brought it back. He was all right. But that was just in party; we had a fantastic trip … absolutely fantastic trip; we still get together and talk about it.

Then I got married and had kids, and so the story goes – that’s it.

Who did you marry?

I married Brian Turner; I’ve been widowed now [for] quite some time. We’d actually parted before he died anyway. I think that just about sums it up; it’s some record, for what it’s worth.

Thank you very much, Pam, indeed … very interesting recollections.

As I say, there’s more … could be a lot more, but you draw the line somewhere.

Pam’s going to talk on her association with birds over her lifetime …

Well, as I said, I started my love of birds as a two year old when I stole a cuckoo out of my mother’s friend’s cuckoo clock. I then used to steal baby ducks out of the creek and rear them – these were grey ducks which are now a very, very rare breed – simply ‘cause I loved looking after birds. I used to go round finding all the birds’ nests around in the bush and around the farm, and assist the parents with feeding them which I don’t think the parents appreciated. Mum and Dad certainly didn’t appreciate it, anyway. And then it just grew from there.

I remember as a four year old having a violent argument with my brother, Peter, because this little fluttering thing up in the sky … he tried to tell me it was a fantail and I just knew it was a long tailed bat. This is a four year old. Anyway, it turns out that Balls Clearing is still very much a stronghold for the long tailed bats, and I studied these and kept records of them right through as an early teenager, and these records have been deposited in the museum in Wellington and they are now still being used by students doing theses on bats. Doctor [?] was the curator of the museum down there in Wellington at the time, and I had personal dealings with him about the Puketitiri bats. I’ve still got these records, and I also was doing daily bird recording for years and years and years. I was probably the youngest member of the Ornithological Society and Forest & Bird Protection Society; I was writing little articles for them as a young teenager while I was still at school – or still attending Correspondence School – and then this gradually grew. When I was nursing at Hastings I got summoned to a senior doctor’s office, which in those days didn’t happen; I was petrified, thinking, ‘What’ve I done wrong? Where’ve I failed? Why was he calling me up?’ And I stood absolutely freezing in his office doorway, hands behind my back and trying not to even breathe; and he said, “Oh, Pam, I’ve got a baby blackbird – what can I do about rearing it?” Which absolutely drove me through the floor.

Anyway, it just went on from there. Conservation as such was never even thought of, let alone invented. And I kept all this a secret, and still continued, secretly, quietly, on the sidelines looking after birds. I’d find a poor mashed thing on the road or something, and look after it and rear it. Even my closest friends didn’t know about it then, I kept it so secret. And then it just snowballed on from there, and when I had children of my own I used to show them how to look after little birds. It gradually started coming in from the general public as word spread around. I had talks at the school and then it rolled on to schools. One school I was invited to I ended up talking to the entire roll of seven hundred and twenty kids; we took them in double class sessions all day, talking and demonstrating to them. This has been an ongoing affair.

Then the Department of Conservation got into conservation … [or] what became the Department of Conservation after it was Forestry Service, and my workload increased, publicity increased. The first real healing I did, I suppose of any significance, was on a harrier hawk, who [which] had been grubbling around on the Taupo road by the Mohaka Bridge for at least a week, with a badly broken and by then infected wing before anybody stopped to pick it up. We brought it in to the vet – I had my cat to the vet for just routine stuff, and I suppose I’d been talking along the way to this vet about things – but anyway, he phoned me up and said, “Well let’s have a go at it, Pam”, so … trotted along to the vet. And we splinted its wing with an ice block stick and UHU glue; I had it at my property for six weeks. I’d by then built an aviary for myself, scrounging material from everywhere to build this aviary. And six weeks later I took this harrier hawk away and let it out of the box on the side of a gully up the Taupo road, where I thought, ‘If it flops into the gully I can pop down and catch it again.’ It just spread its wings and flew across the gully and down the river, and then it turned round and came back and did a couple of flaps over my head and went off into the distance. So I suppose that was really my first public success story, ‘cause the papers got hold of that and put a photo in and stuff.

Then the regional council got hold of me and asked if I’d like to go on the Oiled Wildlife Rehabilitation team that they had at that stage, now called Wildbase, which specialises in wild birds. Puttered off down to Massey University, and we had a demonstration course on crop feeding … tube feeding … these baby birds, or sick birds at that stage. And I had thought during my nursing training, ‘If you can tube feed a baby, why can’t you tube feed a baby bird?’ So I’d been secretly doing this for years, and during this demonstration I hung back, and hung back, and hung back at the back of the class. Finally the vet in charge called me up, “Come on, your turn – come and have a go.” And I did it, [a]part from having to turn everything [a]round, me being left-handed and them being right-handed. He just stood back; he said, “You’ve done this before, haven’t you?” And I just had to say a quiet little “Yes”, because it was just unheard of that you do this sort of thing.

Anyway, it just progressed from there; I was involved with the Cape Sanctuary relocation of the various species of petrels out there. That progressed on to volunteering to go up the Maungahururu Range for the first ever translocation of Mottled petrel and Cook’s petrels up there – I went for ten days as a volunteer and two months later I was still there. Yeah – responsibilities grew, and I lapped them up and loved it, and we had lots of people coming from overseas to learn and to train. I loved that side of it, too, and it’s just gone on from there that I’m one of the inaugural members of the WReNNZ group, which is Wildlife Rehabilitation [Rehabilitators] Network of New Zealand. For many, many, many years I’ve taken in birds that’ve been hurt and injured, come in from the public … come in from all sorts of funny places, even from the prison. Doing rehabilitation work I have a Department of Conservation permit since the permit scheme first became [was first] invented. I think that was about 1990 that they decided they had to have these rehabilitation people permitted to do the job properly.

So that’s it – I suppose you could basically say I’ve been looking after birds for the last … well, I’m eighty-five so it’d be eighty-three years.

Are you known as the bird lady?

I’m known as quite a few things. [Laughter] Yeah, no, it’s …

[Speaking together] Oh, Pam that’s wonderful.

… it’s grown from there. And I’ve had taxi trips to Wildbase with kiwi. My daughter and her daughter are now involved in the kiwi recovery programme out in the Kaweka Ranges, so something has spread and grown; I’m not physically capable of doing it. I’ve had some remarkable successes – the most adoring I suppose you could say would be triplet moreporks; they were so little and so new that their eyes were still shut. They couldn’t even stand up they were so new – no feathers or anything on them.

Would that be a rarity?

Well it’s quite a rarity. They’re not endangered as such, but very few people know anything about them. Being nocturnal, a lot of people know what they sound like. People don’t know that they’ve got seven different calls, and vocabularies. They’re also ventriloquists – they can make their voice sound as if it’s coming from one tree and they’re actually sitting up in the other tree waiting for a mouse or a cockroach to come past. To rear them has been sort of a challenge – I mean, they do this sort of thing up at the Wingspan [National Birds of Prey Centre] at Rotorua, but they’re specialised scientists; I’m just an amateur.

Yeah, and I’ve had a lot of success with kingfishers, too; they’re quite delicate to rear … baby kingfishers. And I rear these with the intention of them being released and going back into the wild. If I feel that a bird can’t recover for any reason … a penguin with one flipper; birds with no eyesight … that obviously cannot be released, well then I have no qualms about having them humanely euthanased, because sadly, there is no life for them.

I don’t believe in caged birds; I don’t have caged birds myself – but in saying that, we had one kereru, the native wood pigeon, [which] came into me as a terribly suffering chick. A fellow had cut the tree down knowing that the nest was in the tree, and he left it on the ground for four days in the rain and the cold and the lice before he decided to do something about it. And this bird was in a terrible state when it came to me, and I looked at it and thought, ‘Do I or don’t I?’ And I thought, ‘Yes, it needs a chance.’ So a friend who’s in this bird rehab with me and I took it over, and we swapped around; if one was going away the other would have it. And we swapped that bird around – hand feeding it – for six months. Theoretically my permits says you can’t keep a bird longer than three months, so anyway, finally I said to John, “We’ve got to make a decision – this can’t go on.” And he made the appointment at the vet to have it euthanased and he gave it to me to take. And I put it in my aviary that night; I said, “I’m sorry – you can’t go on being hand fed; you won’t feed yourself so it’s the vet tomorrow.” Next morning it was feeding itself [chuckle] and I kept it for three weeks, and took it out to my friend who had property right next to Te Mata Park, and we thought this was a good place for it to go. He wanted to photograph it; we decided we’d put it on his bird table with his photographs. I took it out of the cage, I held it up to give it a little goodbye kiss, [and] it flew out of my arms and away before he got his photograph. His wife spent about a week looking for it and was sure she could see it up in the tree, ‘cause it had a little bit of feathers where it’d been hand fed, but the feathers weren’t quite fluffed out properly underneath its chest; and she thought, ‘That’s Pam’s pigeon.’ We never did find its body and it was never reported as being dead. But that was just one of the things.

I had another one, again a kereru – its first flight out of its nest just south of Havelock [North], and it flew into an upstairs window; split all its crop open. And the very caring owners rushed it to me; it was still bleeding … still haemorrhaging. So the first thing I did was stop the bleeding, and I felt this was going to be a vet’s job – I mean, I am limited in what I can do. So I rushed it up to the vet, and luckily there was a very compassionate vet just about to start her lunch break; she said, “Well I’ll do it, but it won’t live.” She spent two and a half hours doing surgery on it; the whole crop was split on both sides, [at] the front and at the back; stitched it up, phoned me to say, “The job’s done – you can have it but it won’t live.” Still wasn’t even out of its anaesthetic. Got it out of its anaesthetic and propped it up and told it it had to live, it was only a young bird, first flight out of its nest. By that evening I was feeding it fruit pulp. [Chuckle] Fourteen days later it was completely healed up; I had to go back to the vet and get some of the stitches removed; they were supposed to be self dissolving, but I could tell the weight of the stitches in the crop was unbalancing it. So I said to the vet, “Well, let’s take out the rest of these stitches.” Fourteen days later it was completely healed; I took it out and it flew away. They’d gathered in all their friends to see this great release, and it flew up into the trees and it sat there and it looked about, and thought, ‘Well by joves, this is home – I just left here fourteen days ago. I’d better get active.’ Flew away.

So that’s just some of the little stories you get. But that’s been a lifelong … apart from my tramping and climbing, and my kids and now my grandkids … it’s been a lifelong … kept me going.

May you keep going a lot longer, Pam.

That’s about it.

Thank you very much indeed.