Aunt Effie and the Island That Sank (5 page)

We worked
along a dredged channel between mud banks wriggling with mangrove roots.

“I think that’s where the smell of ozone comes from,” said Ann.

We tied up ahead of a trading scow. The wharf was high above our heads, up a slippery ladder with mussels growing on the rungs.

A wagon stopped above the trading scow, and the horses sat and smoked their pipes patiently while the crew rolled the top tier of a cargo of barrels of beer and rum up a steep plank to the wharf. There, they skewed them sideways on to another plank and rolled them up on to the wagon. The sailors stood the barrels with a deft twist so they seemed to jump and stand on end by themselves, but it still looked hard work.

The skipper of the trading scow called out to Aunt Effie, “We missed the tide leaving Auckland. That’s why we’ve got all the work of rolling the barrels up instead of down. What makes it worse,” he said, “is that once we’ve got all this stuff ashore, tide will be in and we’ve got to load that manooker aboard.” He nodded at a huge stack of tea-tree firewood. “Which means we’ll have to lug it up on to the deck instead of just throwing it down.”

“Can’t you wait for the next low tide?” we asked him.

“The rubbity-dubs ran out of beer and rum, and it’s Saturday night.” Aunt Effie nodded. “Besides,” the skipper told us, “J.J. Craigs have ordered the tea-tree for their customers, and we’ve got to get it up to Auckland in time for them to deliver for Saturday night.”

“Aunt Effie?” asked Jessie. “What’s a rubbity-dub?”

“A hotel.”

“Why’s it called a rubbity-dub?”

“It’s rhyming slang for pub.”

“Can we go to the rubbity-dub?”

“You’re too young,” Aunt Effie told her, and Jessie cried loudly. “You’re not allowed inside, but I’ll hold you up so you can see through the window.” Like a tap turning off, Jessie stopped crying. She cheered up even more when Aunt Effie told her that the meths drinkers in Auckland called their methylated spirits “Jessie’s dream”.

“Why do they call it that?”

“Rhyming slang again. They call meths steam. Rhyme it and you get Jessie’s dream.”

“I wonder who Jessie was?” we all asked.

“A dissipated old woman who drank methylated spirits till she went blind and died!” Daisy said sternly. “That’s what happens
to people who drink methylated spirits.”

We looked away and wished we hadn’t asked.

“I’m not going to drink meths!” said Jessie. “It stinks! Anyway, it’s blue, like castor oil, and nobody drinks castor oil unless they’re made to.”

We ran a gangplank up on to the wharf, and Aunt Effie rolled us up and stood us on our ends so we could see what it felt like to be a barrel. The men rolling the real barrels of beer and rum lifted their bowler hats to Aunt Effie, and the patient horses took the pipes out of their mouths and nodded respectfully. The stack of firewood towered above us.

“Aunt Effie,” said Lizzie, “why did the man say manooker instead of manuka?”

“It’s just the way some people pronounce it. Some call it red tea-tree, some manooker, and some manuka. Then there’s the big tea-tree. Some call it white tea-tree, some kanooker, and some kanuka. Some even call it white manooker. Whatever name you choose doesn’t make it any easier to lug aboard when tide’s in and your scow’s riding high above the wharf.”

Just then a man with a ladder over his shoulder galloped down the street. At the corner he leaned his horse against a tall street lamp, stood the ladder on its back, and hooked it on an arm that stuck out under the lamp itself. The horse held its breath and kept very still while he climbed up and lit the gas.

The man came down, got the ladder on his shoulder, and galloped to the next street lamp. It took him some time to find his matches, and the horse got sick of waiting and moved on to the next lamp. The man was left swinging on the ladder. “Back up!” he yelled.

“In Auckland, the street lamps aren’t so tall, so the lamp
lighters use bicycles,” Aunt Effie told us. More lights came on up the street. “That’s the hotels lighting up. The gold miners and kauri bushmen will be coming to town for Saturday night.”

“Tsk! Tsk! Tsk!” Daisy clicked her tongue.

“But remember the lights last night?” said Lizzie. “You said it was Saturday night in Coromandel then.”

“Every night’s Saturday night for the gold miners and kauri bushmen in Coromandel and the Thames,” said Aunt Effie. “They’ll be quiet enough for the next hundred years, once all the gold and kauri’s gone.”

Just up the road was a fish and chip shop called “Greasy Mick’s Son and Co.” where Aunt Effie ordered us a feed of mussels and vinegar, and fried flounder and chips. “About enough to fill a dinghy,” she told Greasy Mick’s son.

“Everybody should taste Thames mussels and flatties once,” Aunt Effie said. “They’re the best in the country, but they can’t last at the rate we’re eating them. They dredge the mussels and take them to Auckland by the scow-load.”

We felt guilty but gorged ourselves. Jammed full to the tonsils, we staggered along Pohlen Street, looking at the windows of the chemists’ shops which displayed tins of Edmond’s Baking Soda and Hardy’s Indigestion Remedy. One window was filled with blue bottles of castor oil, white bottles of Lane’s Emulsion, and dark-red bottles of Parrish’s Chemical Food, but we held our noses and crossed the street so we didn’t have to look at them.

Alwyn pointed at some corsets in the window of a dress shop and asked in a loud voice, “What are those?” Daisy coughed. A hardware shop had gum spears in the window, climbing irons, and thigh waders for the gumdiggers; and pans for the gold prospectors. “Eagle Foundry camp ovens just arrived from Glasgow!”
said a sign. “Try our shovels and picks!”

The lower halves of the hotel windows were all painted white with holes scratched in the paint where angry wives had tried to look inside to catch their wicked husbands. That’s what Daisy told us. Aunt Effie held us up to a hole so we could see inside the public bar of the Brian Boru.

We saw miners in blue and grey Crimean shirts, a red bandanna round their necks, and some with bright sashes holding up their moleskin trousers. They wore what Aunt Effie called wideawake hats, high boots, smoked pipes, and swigged beer and rum from barrels on the bar. Some of them sang, some jigged, and some told stories. One saw us looking and flattened his nose against the inside of the window, and Lizzie flattened her nose back.

“They must be telling each other good stories,” she said, “because they laugh so much.”

There was a man in a bowler hat who played a piano, another who fiddled, and one who played an accordion.

“Look at the ladies dancing!” said Jessie.

They wore long frocks, shiny gold, green, blue, and red with lots of lace and kicked their legs right over their heads so their petticoats frothed and garters flashed. We thought they were very beautiful. When they bent over, pulled up their dresses, and showed their ruffled knickers, Daisy cried, “May God forgive them!” and put her hands over the little ones’ eyes.

The gold miners didn’t put their hands over their eyes. They clapped and stamped and bought drinks for the beautiful ladies, and some tried to kick their own legs over their heads, but their high boots were too heavy, and two of them fell over and couldn’t get on their feet again. A kind man came from behind the bar and
rolled them like barrels into the gutter outside. “You can sleep it off in comfort there,” he told them gently.

A miner going into the Brian Boru said Lizzie reminded him of his grandmother and gave her a little bottle of gold dust. “It’s iron pyrites,” said Daisy, “fool’s gold.”

“It is so real!” said Lizzie. “The man said.”

There was a fire-eater further down Pohlen Street, and a tent on one corner with a man who’d been stolen by the Maoris when he was a boy and tattooed from head to foot. The gold miners were going into the tent and coming out laughing. One of them said, “Tattooed, my foot!” which Aunt Effie said meant that it wasn’t real Maori tattooing, just paint. The lady on the tent door wouldn’t let children go in, she said because the Tattooed Man was tattooed all over. And she repeated, “All Over!” with a nod and a wink at Aunt Effie.

We tried crying, so Aunt Effie said we could have a look at the Fat Lady in a tent on the opposite corner. It cost a penny each. The Fat Lady spoke in a high squeaky voice and told us she was the Fattest Lady in the Whole World. We believed her because we couldn’t see the stool she was sitting on.

She wore muslin dresses, several of them, and we could see the rolls of fat that hung down all over her. Although coated in thick powder, the Fat Lady still sweated in the warmth of the tent and the lamps. She smiled, all her chins trembled, and she said to Jessie, “Poke me with your finger, dearie!”

Jessie ran outside and was sick, and Daisy said, “Of course, the child should never have eaten all those mussels and fried flounder and chips.” But we knew what made Jessie throw up.

We walked along counting all the rubbity-dubs till the little ones started grizzling, and Aunt Effie said, “You’re tiredy old
things, aren’t you!” and lifted them on to the dogs’ backs so they could ride to the wharf.

We counted a hundred and nineteen rubbity-dubs before we came to the last one, the Lady Bowen, where another miner gave Jessie a little nugget of real gold because he said she reminded him of his little sister in “Californ-eye-ay”. That’s how he said it, but Daisy said he meant to say California.

The tide had come in, so Aunt Effie rolled us like barrels up the plank. As we climbed into our hammocks, a honky-tonk piano in the Lady Bowen played “You Are My Sunshine” and, on the scow behind us, somebody was playing “Mother Machree” on an accordion.

When they came to, “
God bless you and keep you, Mother Machree!
” somebody said, “That’s for you, Mother Machree!” and there was a thump and a splash. Aunt Effie said, “Saturday night often ends like that in the Thames.”

“Why do you always say ‘the’ Thames?” asked Lizzie.

“I don’t know. I suppose I just grew up hearing everybody else saying it, so I say it, too.”

“Oh,” said Lizzie, but she sounded as if she was already asleep. Then the gas lamps went dim, the lights of the hotels went out, and the shouts and singing faded. We heard Jessie saying, “Tomorrow night I’m going to the rubbity-dub, to the Irish Stew,” and Jared said to her, “What’s the Irish Stew?” and Jessie said, “The Brian Boru!”

“You’re far too young to be even thinking of going near an hotel!” Daisy said. “And even when you are old enough, you must have a chaperon.”

We heard Jessie trying to mumble, “What’s a chaperon?” then we must have all gone to sleep because we were waking up with
bells ringing inside our heads, and Daisy saying, “Everybody up! Put on your best clothes. We’re going to church.”

Lizzie and Jessie held the bottle of iron pyrites and the gold nugget and asked, “Can we go to Greasy Mick and Son’s for breakfast?”

“We haven’t time for church or breakfast,” said Aunt Effie, not if we’re going to get under the Kopu bridge before the tide comes in too far.” She had the dinghy floating astern on the heavy rope we used for towing.

“Kopu,” said Casey. “Is that the place where Wicked Nancy’s Island sank?”

“
Tsk! Tsk!
Tsk!” said Daisy. We looked over our stern and saw the crew of the trading scow fast asleep on its deck, the huge stack of firewood still on the wharf.

“That’s the trouble with Saturday night in the Thames,” Aunt Effie said. “They’re going to miss the tide again. Come on! We’ve got to get under the Kopu bridge, and we don’t want to miss Saturday night in Paeroa!”

We didn’t remind her we’d already had two Saturday nights that week. We towed out the Margery Daw stern first. There was no wind on deck, but the topsails picked up enough for us to ghost up the Waihou River.

At every mangrove tree standing in the water, the little ones cried, “There’s the island that sank!” After a while, they gave up. Then they saw a tea-tree stake sticking out of the water and screamed, “Wicked Nancy’s Island!”

“The tea-tree stakes mark the edge of the channel. Leave them to starboard going upriver, to port coming down,” Aunt Effie said to Marie at the wheel. The little ones looked disappointed.

The river was so wide, and the new Kopu bridge so long, we couldn’t see where it began and finished. Aunt Effie stuck her fingers in her mouth, whistled, and some men started galloping on horses towards its centre span.

“Tide’s pretty low,” said Aunt Effie, “but we’ll never get under. We’ll have to strike our topmasts.”

Before we could do that, the men reached the centre span and began turning winch handles. The whole middle section of the bridge groaned and swung till it pointed upstream and we could get through the gap without lowering the topmasts. Several buggies and a couple of wagons waited on the Auckland side. On the Thames side a leading dog held back a mob of cattle beasts. The drover sat his horse behind them. Further back, his pack-horse came clopping along the bridge, catching up.

“Good boy,” Ann said as we sailed past the leading dog who was being threatened by a black poley steer.

“If that beast goes in the river, the cannibal eels will get it,” said Aunt Effie. We looked at each other. “Cannibal eels!” Jazz mouthed silently.

Alwyn mooed, and the black cattle beast got such a shock it backed from the edge. Then we were past, the centre of the bridge closed behind us, and the buggies and wagons and steers started crossing again.

Between flax swamps, occasional farms, scrub, and patches of kahikatea, we sailed up the Waihou for months, past the end of tidal water. Several times we saw headless cows wandering around, unable to feed or even moo. Once it was a horse which
kept turning around to look at the stump where its tail had been. One poor cow was balancing itself just on its front legs. Its back half had been bitten off.

Aunt Effie shook her head and said, “Those cannibal eels… It’s not just the horses and cows. A few farmers have disappeared, too.”

When we wanted to swim, she just said, “I wouldn’t,” and we thought of the cannibal eels. We didn’t even like to dangle our feet over the side.

At Paeroa, Aunt Effie said it was Thursday and not worth going ashore. We reached Te Aroha a few weeks later, but it was still Thursday, so we kept on.

Below the Gordon, men were blasting snags out of the river so Mr Josiah Clifton Firth could run his steamer, the Kotuku, as far up as Stanley Landing behind Matamata, Aunt Effie said. We saw them blow a log on to the bank, and something else, shiny black, thicker than the log, and nearly as long.

“It moved!” Jane shrieked.

“I think it’s a …” Jazz’s voice dried up.

The men tried to raise it over a branch, but the rope broke. They brought a chain, but the branch broke. They brought horses, dragged the thing to a big kahikatea and got the chain over its lower branch. As they pulled, a huge black head with curved ivory tusks lifted off the ground.

The cannibal eel had been knocked unconscious, but it woke up, bellowed, pulled up the kahikatea by its roots, and started dragging it towards the river. It stopped and looked back.

“It knows kike’s a sinker,” said Aunt Effie. “If it drags the tree into the river, it’ll drown itself. You watch.”

Sure enough, the intelligent beast sliced through the chain
with its tusks. Now it didn’t have to drag the kike around, it bellowed, chased the men up a willow, and slid back into the river. Water surged across the paddocks as the cannibal eel rushed downstream. Despite her beam, the Margery Daw rocked from side to side.

“I hope we don’t find Wicked Nancy’s Island up here,” said Lizzie. “I’m not diving with cannibal eels.”

“A cannibal only eats members of its own species,” Daisy told her. “You’d be perfectly safe!”

“Aunt Effie said they eat farmers!” said Jessie.

Daisy smiled and corrected her. “What she actually said was that some farmers disappeared.”

“All the same …”

The Margery Daw skimmed upstream over the snags and rocks. The men cheered, and Aunt Effie bowed. She leaned over the bulwarks and said to them: “Sixty-six feet nine inches by eighteen feet six inches – she’s the amazing scow!

“She’ll lift in less water than it takes to float a mangrove berry. Centre-board up, she’ll skim across a pipi bank on a heavy dew. She’ll sail on the froth and scum on top of the mud before the tide comes in. She’ll slide up a mangrove creek where you’d never get a boat with a keel. And she’ll sail all the way to Sydney fully loaded with only a foot of freeboard, and a thousand fathoms of blue water beneath her centre-board!”

The men threw their hats in the air and cheered again.

“And you can tell J.C. Firth, if he’s got any sense, he’ll build himself a scow instead of that steel steamer. It’s going to cost him thousands of pounds, to clear the river.”

A white bearded man stood on the bank holding a red-wrapped stick of dynamite.

“Who’s that?” asked Ann.

“J.C. Firth,” said Aunt Effie.

“Why don’t you tell him yourself?”

“He wouldn’t take any notice of a mere woman.”

“You’re no mere woman!” we told Aunt Effie, but she said, “Just look at that man, will you? He’s been handling dynamite, and now he’s rubbing his forehead!”

The old gentleman put his head in his hands and groaned.

“He’s gone and given himself a dynamite headache. He’s going to have some other headaches, too. Big ideas – big headaches!”

Further upstream, Aunt Effie asked if we’d like a swim, but Alwyn ground his teeth like tusks. We shook our heads carefully as if we had dynamite headaches, and Daisy said she felt a cold coming on.

From up the masts we could see for miles. “Everything you’re looking at is the Firth Estate,” Aunt Effie called up to us. “Some say old J.C. Firth leased it off Wiremu Tamihana and the Ngati-Haua about 1866. Some say he pinched it.”

“Is it all one farm?”

“All fifty-six thousand acres.”

“Fifty-six thousand acres!”

“Look at that!” said Jazz. A plough was sinking in a swampy bit. Only the handles stuck out of scummy black water. The draught horses struggled but started sinking, too. We watched amazed as the ploughman tore up whole clumps of tea-tree and tied them in bundles.

“Fascines,” said Daisy who was proud of her wide vocabulary.

The ploughman knelt below the necks of his drowning draught horses. He lifted them clear of the swamp, and kicked
the tea-tree fascines under their hoofs.

He took the plough handles. “Giddup!” The draught horses found their feet and drew the plough out of the swamp with a sucking noise. We watched it dwindle north across the plain, the single furrow a straight black line.

“That’s the powerful Mr Given,” said Aunt Effie. “He started ploughing from Matamata this morning. Tonight he’ll finish in Te Aroha. Tomorrow, he’ll turn round his team and plough one furrow all the way back to Matamata. That’s how big the paddocks are on the Firth Estate.”

“How long does it take to plough a whole paddock?” asked Colleen who was always interested in statistics.

“About a year,” said Aunt Effie. “Then a year to sow it in wheat. A year to grow. And a year to cut it down. And then J.C. Firth plans to sail his crop up to Auckland and grind it in his flour mill in Fort Street.

“The only trouble is that he doesn’t know the summer’s too wet here. Before it’s ripe enough to cut, his wheat’s going to sprout and start growing in the ear. It’ll be ruined.

“He’ll build the road to Cambridge. And he’ll build the Tower on top of Tower Hill. But he’ll go broke and have to sell off his enormous farm.” Aunt Effie looked pleased. Telling us a bit of history always made her feel that she was making up for taking us out of school. “He’ll break up part of his estate into little farms around Hopuruahine, and they’ll build a railway station, a school, and a dairy factory there.”

“That’s where we live!” we all said.

Aunt Effie nodded. “Just across there,” she said and pointed west. “It looks different from up the mast of a scow.”

“It’s not just that,” Marie said. “But we’re not even born yet.”

“It’s the 1880s,” said Aunt Effie. “Some of you are born or nearly born, and some of you won’t be born for another century, but that doesn’t matter.” She nodded. “There’s Stanley Landing.”

We looked and saw a concrete jetty and an iron shed waiting for the Kotuku to come and load Mr Firth’s wheat.

“And there’s the waterfall!” said Jessie. We all looked up at the Kaimais, at Wairere Falls, their white bend against the dark bush.

“I wonder if we’ll ever go up there?” asked Lizzie.

“You will,” said Aunt Effie. “Sooner than you think.”

She picked up a couple of us and sniffed. “Whew! You pong! You haven’t had a swim for several months because Alwyn keeps making cannibal eel noises. That’s why everyone’s getting a bit on the nose.”

She ran the Margery Daw in against the eastern bank. “See those two tawas? Take a towel and a lump of yellow soap and climb between them. You’ll come to a fence running off into the pigfern. Keep to the right, and you’ll see a patch of white manooker. The other side of it, you’ll see some pongas down the gully, and hot water bubbling out of the ground – what they call the Okauia Springs. Keep following your noses, and you’ll have the best swim of your lives. You can have a good scrub – and wash your hair while you’re about it. I’ll be waiting in the grownups’ pool to give you a hand.”

We watched Aunt Effie sail upstream. “What if she’s left us here,” said Ann, “and she never comes back?”

“Like ‘The Babes in the Woods’” cried Jazz.

“Then we’ll lie down and go to sleep and the birds will cover us with leaves,” cried Beck.

“And the giant cannibal eel will follow our scent and crawl
under the leaves and eat us,” cried Alwyn.

We all began to cry. All of us except Daisy who said, “There’s the track and the white manooker. Come on!” She picked up the towel and the yellow soap, and we followed, grateful that Daisy was so sensible.