The Runaway Settlers (6 page)

The next day, Mr Dyer went with the boys to the saddle and showed them his own way over. With nothing to carry, the walk would take them little more than three hours.

Mrs Phipps had now to harvest the potatoes and work over her land with only Archie and Jim to help. There was little to do in the house, for they could only afford the simplest of meals: porridge and tea and damper and pork and potatoes. Like other settlers she learned to eke out the tea by mixing in dried biddy-bids. She could not bake bread, for she had no yeast and no camp-oven. But one day, while bringing water from the spring, Archie nibbled at a thick green leaf and liked the taste. Mrs Phipps cooked some of the leaves and they did very well instead of spinach.

A fowl-run was built with a log house and a fence of criss-crossed sticks. Into this went the pullets and a big rust-coloured rooster. Tools, plants, seeds, a few supplies, and a wooden tub to be placed before the fire to serve as a bath were bought in Lyttelton. Mr Parsons fetched these things in his boat and landed them on the sandy beach.

Late autumn passed into winter. Storms came, but there were no hard frosts in this sheltered bay. The dug ground lay ready, the fruit trees were trimmed, new ones were planted, and strawberries were set out on a sunny bank. At nights Mrs Phipps sat mending and patching the clothes by the light of the fire and the slush-lamps, which were made from pig’s fat
set in a tin with a home-made wick in the centre. These winter evenings were jolly; for while she stitched, Mrs Phipps told stories to the children, or sang long ballads with a chorus for them all to join in. After Emma had fallen asleep, or on wet days, their mother took out books and slates and pencils to begin teaching Jim and Archie their letters and numbers.

They knew now that Mr and Mrs Parsons were not only farmers, but school-teachers. That was how they had met and fallen in love—teaching school on the long sea journey from England. In time, the boys would go to school at the Parsons’ cottage; but they could wait until Bill and Jack had served their term at Cashmere; and besides, there would be threepence a day to pay, and lesson-books into the bargain.

Meanwhile Archie and Jim had plenty to learn out-of-doors. With no pet to keep for himself, Archie made friends with the bush birds. He found that a little sugared water in a deep shell would bring the tuis and bellbirds close to the door. Tomtits, fantails and robins hopped around without any enticement at all. The saucy wekas were curious about these odd human beings and even came right into the hut to steal a shiny teaspoon. As for the slow, stupid and lovable woodpigeons, they were so tame that many a one ended up as a tasty meal for a settler’s table.

Archie did not like this idea when he first heard of pigeon stew. But when the pork ran out and everyone was growing tired of potatoes and porridge, Mrs Phipps went quietly through the bush with a long pole, until she found an overfed bird dozing on a low branch. He did not even turn his head as she stunned him and swept him to the ground. That evening, Archie had to harden his heart; and it was not so difficult with that delicious smell coming from the pot.

The boys were hunters on the beach, too. Up at the Pinnacle, a steep rock that stood out of the sea but could be climbed at low tide, there were mussels and rock oysters, and big red crabs that would grip on a stick to be hauled up. Once, early in the morning, they found stranded on the shore a thin fish that was longer than Archie was tall. It served for three meals. Mr Dyer said it was a frost-fish.

One day, Mrs Parsons came to call. She was a tall, smartly-dressed woman who was fast friends with the children within half an hour. She was delighted to learn that the boys would be her pupils next year, and asked how Bill and Jack were faring.

‘They have no means of telling me,’ said Mrs Phipps. ‘I should dearly love to see for myself.’

‘Could I take these three to my house for a day? You’d like to see my picture books, wouldn’t you, Jim? And I’ll make you some currant buns!’

‘I can draw pictures, too,’ said Jim proudly. He could hardly wait for this special treat.

On the next fine morning they all went to the Parsons’ cottage, and Mrs Phipps set off over the saddle. Mr Dyer’s route was easily followed. When she rested it was not because she needed to, but to enjoy the harbour with its blending shades of blue, and the hills with their spurs and gullies and craggy tops. Although it was mid-winter, the sun was warm and the bush was still; but when she came out on to the tussock facing the Plains, with its homesteads and cultivated squares dotted here and there, a cold north-east wind swept up to meet her. Patches of ice and hard frost clung to the shaded hollows. Mrs Phipps drew her shawl close around her shoulders and hurried on.

When she came to Cashmere, she could find no one about
the barracks but the Indian cook who, confused at her arrival and with many gestures to help out his halting English, pointed in the direction of the swamp.

Six weeks earlier she had worked there herself, cutting the flax. Now they were putting in a drain, but meantime the winter ground was more boggy than ever, and icy water squelched over her ankles and oozed into her boots. Soon she saw the knot of workmen—two tall men with strong forks and spades loosening the old roots, and beyond them, half-hidden in the ditch, bare hands grubbing out the clods and hurling them out.

‘Bill! Jack! I’ve come!’ she called.

Two short grubbing tools came flying out after the clods, and the boys leapt out of the ditch and came towards her.

The biting wind blew across the swampland to send a great shiver rippling down Jack’s shoulders. He wore no jersey, and his bare arm showed through a rip the whole length of his shirt-sleeve. This was the same shirt, the same pair of trousers that he had worn when he had left her! Bill was dressed no better, and the bones pressed against the skin of his shoulders. On their bare feet, through the dirty scum left by the swamp water, showed red, ugly lumps—something they had never known in Australia: chilblains.

Mrs Phipps went white with horror and anger.

‘What have they done to you?’ she cried. She turned to the man with the fork. ‘Who is responsible for this?’

The man shrugged. ‘I ain’t no boss, lady. And I ain’t no nursemaid either.’

‘We don’t do this for pleasure ourselves,’ said the second man.

Suddenly Jack, forgetting he was a working-man, reached out and took his mother’s hands.

‘Mother, let us come home!’

‘We wanted to run away,’ said Bill in a low voice, ‘but they sit watching us at night—and there’s the contract, and the wages. We didn’t know what to do.’

They began to walk away in the direction of the barracks, leaving the labourers standing.

‘Who watches you?’ demanded Mrs Phipps.

‘The Indians.’

‘The Indians!’

‘We’re in their quarters now—and we can’t eat their food even when there’s enough of it!’

‘And we work till we’re fair beat,’ said Jack.

‘Nabob Wilson allows this?’ cried Mrs Phipps. ‘He gave me his promise!’

‘We never see him.’

‘He rode by one day—I tried to stop him but he took no notice,’ said Bill. ‘The contract—’

‘The contract is broken!’ Mrs Phipps said angrily. ‘He has broken it. They have not kept the promise on which my promise depended. Go in there, boys, and collect your things.’

‘That won’t take long,’ said Bill bitterly, but he was full of joy at the same time.

The Indian cook came to the doorway and jabbered in broken English so excitedly that it was impossible to understand him. Mrs Phipps only said firmly, ‘I am going to see the judge. I am going to see Mr Cracroft Wilson.’ While she stood there the boys collected their bundles and dodged out.

‘Have you no boots?’ asked Mrs Phipps. ‘None at all?’

‘They have fallen to pieces,’ answered Jack.

‘Then go slowly up the hill, and wait for me.’

In spite of their painful feet the boys began running; and
the Indian cook, though he would have tried to stop them, was unwilling to push past Mrs Phipps who still blocked the doorway. When she felt sure they were well away she turned and, with a proud step and cold fury inside her, set off for the homestead. She found the Nabob in the stable-yard, grooming his horse.

‘Good morning, Mrs Phipps!’ he said. ‘And how have you found Governors Bay? Your boys are working in the swamp, I think; it’s being drained.’

‘No they’re not,’ she said bluntly. ‘I’ve sent them home.’

The Nabob gaped.

‘
You
have sent them home! Mrs Phipps, they are contracted to work here for six months!’

‘The contract is broken, sir. You have broken it, not I.’

‘
I
have broken it?’ The nerve of this little woman! ‘I don’t know what you are talking of. I brought you from Australia to work for me.’

‘You gave me your promise that they would be well fed, housed, and clothed. I find them starving, shivering, with no boots to their feet, crippled with chilblains and housed with the Indians. I left them sturdy and strong in spirit; and I find them cowed and miserable.’

‘Where I house my workers is my concern, madam. My Indians are faithful servants.’

‘I hold nothing against them, but their ways are strange—’

He interrupted her furiously.

‘You are not employed here, Mrs Phipps! You will please remove yourself from this property. You are a trespasser, madam!’

‘And you have dared to trespass on the self-respect of my
boys!’ she cried. ‘I assure you, sir, I have come only to do you the courtesy of informing you of their departure. They have already removed themselves without your invitation.’

‘You forget yourself! I must remind you that the house where you live is at my disposal. I could turn you off with less warning than you are giving me.’

If he thought this would frighten her, he had mistaken his woman.

‘You must turn me off in person, then,’ she said calmly. ‘But I think you have your own interests too much at heart. I and my family are of more service to you when we are not driven. Why don’t you come to Governors Bay? You will see a cottage that was falling away from neglect, and a garden that was ruined by the wild pigs, all in perfect order, with young fruit trees already planted. What will you do with it? Give it to the care of idlers who will run off when the fancy takes them, as your last tenants did?’

The Nabob could hardly believe his ears. No one ever spoke to him in this way! But there was no answering her argument: it would not pay him to turn her out.

‘See that your boys are obedient to you, then, if they cannot be obedient to me. I shall come to Governors Bay when it suits my convenience. Go, now!’

She thanked him courteously and hurried away up the hillside. Beyond the plantation of young English trees, out of sight of the homestead and the Nabob and the swamp, she stopped to get her breath, and found herself laughing.

‘Not a word said about their wages!’ she remembered. ‘Let him keep what he owes, then. May it comfort him for his loss!’

She went on. It was much easier this way, with the steep
climb at the beginning, than the route they had taken on their first nightmare journey over the hills. She had to stop for breath once or twice, and then she saw Bill and Jack waving down to her. They were perched on a rock, sheltered from the cool wind, and rubbing some warmth into their feet; but the warmth only brought the sting into the chilblains.

‘Your feet!’ said Mrs Phipps. ‘We must do something about this—you can’t go over stones and tussock and heath like that. Let me see inside your bundles.’

Inside, neatly folded, were the good jackets and trousers she had bought in Sydney. It had never occurred to either of the boys, cold though they had been every day, to turn them into working clothes. Apart from these there were only ragged singlets and shirts.

Mrs Phipps ripped the old worn shirts into strips and carefully bound up the sore and grimy feet. As for the good clothes, the boys must put them on at once. They looked very funny indeed—with bags on their feet and smart Sydney jackets on their shoulders—and both boys broke into roars of laughter. Bill took up a stone and sent it bouncing down the hillside for sheer joy; and Jack sent another bouncing down after it.

‘I can’t believe it’s us—and we’re free, free, free!’ cried Bill. The wind carried his voice to echo across the valley: ‘Fre-e-e!’

It was a wonder that the whole of Governors Bay wasn’t roused as the three Phippses came over the saddle, singing all the way.

Mrs Phipps took some of her dwindling store of money and walked into Lyttelton with Archie to buy warm working clothes for Bill and Jack. The clay road, more than six miles long, followed the fringe of the harbour, over spurs and around bays and through patches of bush and of open tussock. Halfway to Lyttelton they passed by the Maori village of Rapaki, but nobody was about.

The boys’ feet soon healed and their flesh filled out again with rest, warmth and good food. True, much of the food had to be caught, but Jack was specially good at catching wekas and pigeons, and it was always possible to find shellfish and crabs. There was plenty of work still to be done in readiness for the spring season.

One day, Bill was at work putting a fence along the top of the section when Mr Dyer came looking for straying calves. The upright totara posts, dragged from the bush and pierced with holes at either end, were already in position with long rails pitted into the holes. There was no centre rail and Bill was filling in the space with strong flax sticks, criss-crossed and bound firmly at top and bottom.

Mr Dyer watched Bill’s capable hands with admiration. He himself came from a family of English gentlemen farmers and had made many blunders while growing used to this rougher kind of life.

‘You’ve a big job there,’ he said.

Bill pointed to the slope already prepared for the sowing. ‘We have to keep the pigs off the garden,’ he said.

‘You’re making a grand success of it. You must have been born for this life.’

‘Me, Mr Dyer? Not me! I’d’ve stayed in Australia and swagged it to the diggings if I could.’

‘You mightn’t have to go to Australia for that, before long, from what I hear. They’re prospecting all over the place.’ Bill looked interested, but said nothing, so Mr Dyer went on: ‘I can’t build a fence all round my wheatfield. I have to hunt the pigs off as best I may.’

‘My brother killed one with his sheath-knife!’

‘With his sheath-knife! But how could he bail him up, without a dog?’

Mr Dyer listened with amazement as Bill told the story. ‘He shouldn’t try that again. It’s too dangerous,’ he said. ‘How would you boys like to join forces with me and go out with dogs and a gun?’

‘Truly—could we? Truly?’

From then on, wild pork took first place on the Phipps’s dinner-table. Sometimes the boys did a few days’ work for Mr Dyer, and were paid wages. With this money, Mrs Phipps bought a camp-oven. This was a big, heavy iron pot with a close-fitting lid which, standing on hot embers and covered by more hot embers, would bake the most delicious bread and scones. The little hut seemed always to breathe out the aroma of fresh-baked bread and of pork slowly roasting on the spit.

Immediately the earth began to warm and dry out, the seeds were planted and soon tiny green shoots appeared in neat rows all over the slope. ‘Yes, it’s fertile, early land,’ rejoiced Mrs Phipps.

One day while pig-hunting the boys came across a sow with five little piglets. Mr Dyer took two of the piglets and the other three were put in the new chicken-run already prepared for the broody hens. Here in the evening Archie was found, happily feeding them with the family’s milk which they sucked from his fingers. They were funny little reddish-coloured creatures that were soon tame enough to let Emma play with them although, being only a little creature herself, she pulled them around roughly.

As each of the first two was carried off to be made into roast sucking-pig, Archie cried and protested. As for the third one, he clung to it with such love and determination that his mother had not the heart to take it away. Soon he was following Archie everywhere, like a puppy. Archie called him Wagga.

On a warm morning in October, Mrs Phipps harvested the first spring cabbages, onions and radishes. They were carefully packed into sacks roped at both ends to be slung across the shoulders, swagger fashion; and Bill and Jack set off on the journey to market them in Lyttelton.

‘Shall we spend some of the money, Mother?’ Jack asked hopefully.

‘Yes,’ she answered with her teasing smile. ‘I shall require needles and white thread, some linen buttons, paper for your lessons, and—saltpetre for curing bacon—’

‘You shan’t eat Wagga, you shan’t!’ cried Archie and ran outside to make sure his pet was still there. Mrs Phipps went on, ‘and some cup-hooks for the wall. That will do, I think. Six items.’

Jack repeated the list. ‘Needles, thread, linen buttons, saltpetre, paper, cup-hooks, and fishing lines. Seven items.’

His mother laughed with him. ‘Six and one make seven.
You are doing well with your number lessons,’ she said.

The clay road was drying out with the warmer weather, although there were places where the boys had to skirt round patches of mud churned up by the hooves of horses. Above the Pinnacle they went, and around two small bays, until they mounted a hill and looked down into the wide valley beyond it. Here, where the dark trees met the rocky ridges which stretched up to the outcrop of Witch’s Hill, stood a cluster of huts. This was Rapaki.

Bill and Jack had not directly encountered the Maoris. They were often seen around the Bay, gathering shellfish or fishing from their boats, which they handled expertly. They were Christians and tried to live like Europeans, but they only half succeeded. Their houses were not Maori style but built after the fashion of whaler’s huts. Reeds and rushes were woven over a supplejack frame, plastered with clay and roofed with thatch, with a chimney at one end and square holes for windows. Under the eaves there hung large eels and small sharks drying in the sun, sending out a strong fishy smell on the easterly breeze; and pigs ran about everywhere.

But there were two modern buildings of which the whole village was very proud: the church and the school. Most of the older people and all of the young ones could read and write, which was more than could be said of many white people at that time. It did not matter to them if their European clothes were worn in odd ways, or if some of them still preferred a blanket tied across the shoulders.

The boys walked silently down the hill. They felt nervous but neither would admit it. After all, they’d lived alongside the aborigines! But the blackfellows were slender and timid compared with these burly, tattooed men who shouted ‘Hu!
Hu!’ in deep voices as they plied their paddles over the harbour.

An old man with white hair was squatting against a sunny wall, with his head on his knees and his blanket spread like a tent. He did not look up until the boys were near. Then with a sudden shout he sprang to his feet; and people appeared from everywhere: women with babies tied in a pikau on their backs, toddlers, boys and girls, young men, old men.

‘What shall we do if they grab us?’ whispered Jack.

‘It’s fatal to run away. If they touch us, we’ll dodge up the hill!’

Bill and Jack marched on. The road was too narrow to avoid the waiting group, and a two-year-old boy leaned from a woman’s arms to catch at Jack’s sandy-coloured hair. The hot air from the pipe she was smoking blew across Jack’s face, and her eyes looked strange under her hat—a man’s felt hat faded to a dull green. Jack pushed the child away and a gabble of voices broke out around him. Hands were everywhere; the sack of cabbages was slipping from his shoulders; and Bill had vanished. With his throat so dry that he couldn’t utter a sound, Jack ducked between the blanket-wearers and made a dash for the hill.

At first he felt sure that he was being followed by a dozen men or more; but soon the voices seemed distant and he crept behind a bush to look back. The Maoris were still clustered in the road and there was no sign of Bill.

Jack went on moving stealthily in the direction of Lyttelton, aiming for a point just above where the road crossed the next hill. Everything was very quiet. After a time he heard a low whistle from up above him, and when at last he caught a glimpse of his brother he saw with relief that Bill was still carrying his sack.

At least one of them had not been robbed! But Jack cursed his bad luck. With only half their supply of vegetables to sell, there could hardly be enough money to buy fishing-lines.

Still carefully keeping concealed from any watching eyes, the boys moved from bush to bush and hollow to hollow, coming closer until they slid together through the tussock over the brow of the hill. A thrill of triumph ran through them. They had escaped!

‘Hurrah!’ cried Jack and stood up—to find himself looking straight into the eyes of a Maori boy sitting alone on a bank.

He gasped and began to run. The boy ran also, shouting, and soon was ahead of them in the middle of the road. ‘Grab a stick, Jack, we’ll stand and fight,’ said Bill.

Jack needed no persuading. He tore a dry branch from a fuchsia tree and stopped to size up his enemy. The Maori boy, wearing long trousers and a back-to-front sailor’s jersey with one sleeve missing, stared back at them. Suddenly, like an eel he darted past and backed up the hill the way he had come. Bill and Jack watched, not moving, still grasping their sticks.

When the boy reached the skyline he lifted something up and sent it rolling towards them. Then, shouting, he flung himself into the air with both arms and legs outstretched and disappeared down the other side of the hill. The object kept on rolling.

‘It’s my cabbages!’ cried Jack.

‘They were afraid we’d tell the police,’ scoffed Bill. ‘They’re awfully scared of our police.’

All the same, he was not sure that this was the right explanation.