Chapter 9 - The First Peat Fires
Fred and Esther strolled outside. Once out of sight of the others Fred took her hand and Esther could feel his anxiety. In his letters he had tried to convey his conviction of the great potential of this Waikato swamp. Used to hilly sheep farming country round Pahiatua would she see the good in this, he wondered.
“The whare doesn’t look very big,” he said, “but some day there’ll be a wide veranda in front with those fancy concrete pillars. We’ll have a big sitting room with an open fireplace.”
“And you can do some of your beautiful inlay work on the surrounds and mantelpiece,” suggested Esther.
“We’ll have three bedrooms on the sunny side and the maid’s room and Sam’s room can be this side of the kitchen.”
“Put the kitchen in the place where it is coolest,” said Esther. “The fire had to be going nearly all the time and a kitchen does get so hot!”
They turned to look down over the farm. There was tufted grass and rushes with a few straggly manuka trees on the three paddocks on the hill. Here they could see the forty six cows now grazing.
“They haven’t done as well as I hoped,” observed Fred “and I’m afraid they have started to drop already. In October my first cheque, I received ten shillings ten pence and last month we sent away forty six pounds eleven shillings & five pence worth of cream.
“Which is spotted devil?” asked Esther. Fred pointed out the big long legged heifer, spotted red & white. Even while grazing with the other cows she seemed to be ever on the move.
“She’s caused trouble ever since she’s been on the place,” said Fred bitterly. “And even before we got her here,” he added.
“Yes, you told me that,” she said sympathetically.
“Then when she calved at the beginning of July she had a dead calf. Our new bails weren’t quite ready so we put up temporary yards near the whare but she smashed through those and cleared a fence too. Mr McMullen and Edgar came to help put her into his yards but she jumped the lot. Maybe she’s the original cow that jumped over the moon.”
Mr McMullen came over and helped us to fix the yards and we managed to milk her in the evening but she wasn’t worth milking. As soon as he can spare the time to butcher a cow I’ll let him have that one.” “Hasn’t she settled down at all?” asked Esther.
“Well, we milked her by hand till we started the LKG machines on August 23rd. There were fifteen cows in then and only two of them had ever been milked by machines before. Most of them settled down fairly quickly but that devil kicked and kicked. For a whole week we had to tie two of her legs and hold the cups on too all the time she was milking. Usually now one leg rope is enough but she will kick off the cups if she hears a fly buzzing.”
“Do you think the machines are a good idea?” asked Esther. “Well, at first it took us four days to get enough cream to put in the can to send, but now we are sending cream twice a week. You know I don’t want you to have to help in the shed,” said Fred. “That’s why I spent two hundred & fifty pounds to put in the machines so come and look.’
They walked down the track and as Esther looked at the concreted yard and bails she remembered Fred’s boast, “You can dance in your pretty ball-room slippers in my shed” Farmers were only just beginning to realize how important cleanliness was and there were still hard words being said at a factory management that insisted the cream should be clean.
“The factory found a mouse in Jack’s can,” Fred said, “and they put dye in it and sent it back, was he mad!” “What would you have done?” asked the visitor. “Oh,” laughed Fred, “we always stir our cream very carefully before we put it on the cart to take it to the main road. Besides we wouldn’t let a mouse get in because we cover the can with a piece of muslin when we have finished milking.”
“We really are only using the hills,’ he told Esther. “There’s about 160 acres of flat but the tangle of manuka and roots make it almost impenetrable except where we have cut tracks through. The main drain goes round the base of the hill right through the middle of Okoropong from McMullan’s along the boundary between us and McDonald’s and out through Peach’s.”
In the months they had been on the farm the boys had cleaned out the drain and cleared the manuka from it, and they could see a patch of about 5 acres where the ti-tree had been cut and was lying in a brown heap. Nearby, a plume of grey smoke wafted lazily into the still air. “We are burning a big log which we dug out of the drain. I hope there aren’t any more under the manuka the other side of the drain. But we won’t need to buy any fence posts for a long time.”
“You’ll have to cut them up though,” remarked Esther, remembering the bush felling her own Father and Brothers had to do. Was that remark a premonition of the hours and hours of hard physical labour that breaking in this wooded swamp entailed?
Just as they finished tea that night, a knock came on the door, and Esther was introduced to Mr Cunningham. Almost the only “proper” trees that could be seen from Okoropong were those that Cunningham’s had planted round their house in the few years they had been in the district.
“My hay will be ready tomorrow,” Mr Cunningham said and the two Brother’s promised to be there. Esther knew that the farmers worked in groups of about 12 men (four or five farms) to put in the hay, but it was hard to let him go when there was so few days together in her precious holidays anyway.
During the night she was awakened by the vicious sou-west wind whirling against the little house. The windows rattled, and the tin chimney protested in funny little pops and creaks, a frightening sound if you did not know what it was. When Fred opened the back door in the morning the wind howled inside, slamming all the doors and filling the kitchen with horrible smelling puffs of smoke from the fire. It’s a nasty day, thought Esther, and a little tear rolled down her cheek as the men went off. Cunningham’s farm was just on the next hill but there was a boggy manuka filled gully between the two houses and they had to go around the road about a mile to get there.
“We’ll do some washing,” suggested Mrs Williamson. “I expect there is a lot to do.” “Fred said we could use the copper at the shed, or we can boil up water here. In this wind it will be difficult to get either fire going properly.”
At last some of the washing was ready to put on the line but the wind still howled from Lake Tuna Waka Peke Peke, tearing the clothes from the ladies hands as they tried to peg them up. It took two of them to hold a heavy sheet and even a dozen pegs would not hold it on the line. All day they ran backwards and forwards putting in pegs as they spun away.
“Isn’t there more smoke than there should be?” remarked Esther anxiously. “And it’s got a different smell some how.” “It will be better when Fred can plant some trees,” said the older woman, and Esther agreed bravely.
“My brother George planted seeds for me as soon as he knew we were engaged,” she said. “The tiny trees were up the last weekend I was home; pines, macrocarpa and some gum trees.”
Work in the hay field had fared very little better, wrenching the fork-full as the men tried to toss them onto the stack. Dust and pollen filled their eyes and hair. By early afternoon, billowing, grey filled the sky and it was a very worried pair of young men who arrived home. The women were anxious too. A strange smell filled the air. The thick, acrid smell of burning peat which made the nostrils tingle and permeated into every corner. It was new to the young people that January afternoon, but for the next 30 years it was the dominant smell of a Waikato autumn. Whipped by the rough, whirling wind, the little fire had leapt from its place, blazed into the manuka and run rapidly along the drying moss. Now it was in the standing trees, flaring up the loose bark, blazing in the dry leaves of the toi-toi, onward, ever onward, driven by the gale. “It’s into Peach’s,” groaned Fred as they finished milking that night. “Look at our boundary fence posts lighted up like torches.”
By next afternoon the whole area was burning. Peach’s house was menaced and the Gordonton settlement was in danger. Every available man in the district came to help. They dug a trench in front of the fire and left it to burn out, but they guarded the wooden homes carefully until the rains came.
Fred and Sam went with Mrs Williamson and Esther to see the government experimental farm at Ruakura. “Sow grass seed straight away,” they said, and the young farmers were heartened to see the rich grass growing there. The Waikato could grow good pasture.