Early Northland.Read about my family and my home town of
Kaikohe, Northland, New Zealand
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Early Days in the Far North

Excerpt from an autobiography by my Uncle Raymond Fletcher - Part 2

Father was a very friendly man - very companionable, strict and very tidy. He was always the cleverest lightning sketch artist I have ever seen, and was always on demand everywhere for concerts, etc., and he was exceptionally clever with any mental work. He could play the flute and the violin and often played the accordion. Through his singing, I got to know most of the old popular songs; one which I've never heard sung by anyone else, I record here -

A mother was bidding good-bye to her boy,
He was going to leave her next morn.
It was hard to depart from the one that he loved,
And the humble cot where he was born.
His mother said "Boy, don't yield to despair,
there's no trouble without its alloy,"
They never more met, but he never forgot his fond mother's appeal to her boy.

Well, that was father. And what about Mother? She was a kind and patient woman, very generous, very gentle and understanding, and we all loved her - everybody loved her. How she could have put up with everything we kids did, and work hard all her days, and die peacefully at the age of 82 years is something to wonder about.

In the Waihopo and Houhora districts, were a good proportion of Dalmatian and Maori, and we got on well with all of them. In our roamings, we would hide behind bushes and call out all sorts of names to any newcomers to the gumlands - worse still, it often happened that a gum-digger could not take home all the gum he found, and us kids, on the search for easy gum picking, would lift everything we could find. Well, we were never caught.

The tea-tree bushes were sometimes full of tea-tree jacks, or "walking straws" as we called them. I'm afraid we terrorised the girls often as we chased them with these queer, but harmless insects. Even as a six or eight year old, I, like most young 'uns, had my sweetheart, but seemed to have a protective instinct to my older sister. More than once a punch up drove away one of her would be suitors...and us still in the primers! I think I had a fist fight nearly every week of my school days. I can hardly believe it now, but that was so. We scorned as sissy, the art of wrestling.

The Waihopo School was a one roomed, one teacher school. We had a good teacher. My clearest memory of him was that he was big and fat, fond of beer, and fond of poetry. He used to stand in front of the whole school and recite poems, and was good to listen to. This may be why I became a fiend for poetry, and perhaps to her dismay (though she never once rebuked me) I, for years, followed my mother about in the house reading poetry to her.

During the last four years of my school life I was the one always picked out by a teacher to stand up in class and recite a poem (we had to learn one each term) but I know by memory most of the poems in the school books. At concert time I had to go on the stage and repeat one and an encore. At Church Band of Hope concerts, it was the same.

Now our teacher, Mr. Collins, in Waihopo, stayed at the Houhora Hotel and most weekends he became drunk and could not get to school until near midday on Monday, and sometimes did not turn up till Tuesday morning, so one can imagine we kids used to get on the rampage.

My father was a member of the School Committee and about the time we left Waihopo, the Committee had succeeded in getting a new teacher.

I seemed to have a knack of getting into minor (?) accidents.

At 5 years of age, I ran into a one wire barb fence which left a permanent scar on the side of my mouth. The next December, while running hard I jumped on a piece of broken brick and sent all the Christmas holidays laid up and causing another permanent scar, this time on my left foot. The next December, while out on the gum fields, and a long way from home, I put my foot through the turf (I was wearing sandals) into some white hot ash. (Parts of the gum lands burned all the year round). I was carried home and for ten weeks I spent the Christmas holidays plus, while mother nursed a very severe burned foot and ankle. This accident destroyed the growth for keeps of all the toenails on my right foot.

Now the only source of milk was tins of condensed milk. Some of the boys used to obtain a tin and we would drink it between us. The empty tin was our hockey ball. We loved to play hockey. Our hockey stick was cut from a tea-tree bush. The tin ball soon became a well-battered article, and one day I jumped over a tea-tree bush on the edge of the playing field to retrieve our "ball", and I landed fair on the upturned broken base of a large beer bottle. The journey home was a long one (for someone else) and so I spent my third Christmas holidays laid up. There was no-one to stitch up gaping wounds.

On several occasions a few families would take off in carts and we would camp for a couple of nights on one of the nearest East Coast beaches. These beautiful small beaches were safe and the cliffs lined with grand old pohutukawa trees. Crayfish and all kinds of shell fish were easily obtained. There was no other life but us about - we were all alone, it seemed, in a world of our own.

When the tea-tree flowered (It was the only scrub about except bracken fern) the countryside was a sight with masses of white, and plenty of dark pink flowers. We roamed among the mangrove swamps and creeks and over to the sand-hills of the Ninety Mile Beach. These high sand hills were partly covered with glorious white Prince of Wales feathers, and the sand sloped down to the sea, but here we were often out of bounds, for treacherous quick-sands were not uncommon.

Among our favourite past-times were the flying of kites. The hills were ideal for this. We made bows from tea-tree sticks, and arrows from bracken fern sticks, often with a nail fastened to the end. We made whipping tops, the whips were of patted flax, but there wasn't so much scope for this sport, so we made up for this by making life miserable for every cat we could lay our hands on. There were sometimes innumerable frogs which must have wished they were never born, while hundreds of birds had to keep on laying or find new nests. We cut tea-tree with a brush on one end, and chased countless flying grass-hoppers (as big as one's finger) and also dragon-flies. Even the crabs which lived in holes in the mud of the creeks - yes the crabs got their share of persecution.

There came a day when our parents said "We're selling up and going back to Onehunga." "You are becoming a bit wild," Mother said. Dear Mother. Perhaps a little of what she didn't know she guessed. So our home and it's half acre, the garden and the poultry (the only things in the North fenced in were poultry) were all sold for £15 ($30) and we were on the boat heading back to Auckland.

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Updated April 22, 2000