A final link

Just to say that I have started to put a new blog together using Margan's account of her childhood and photos from her album circa 1920 in Yorkshire. Thank you Cherry for the typed version. It's great.

You can view it at

http://marganswords.blogspot.com/

With love

Me. Mum, and the World

The last post

So here we are at the end of the journey.

A final day in Christchurch, packing bags down to fit the requirements; trying to prepare for the long long long haul flight ahead. We are going to be traveling for close to 30 hours. The final flight being some 25 hours. I have had to ring Qantas to try and get a seat near the loo. I am dreading the imprisonment.

In the square a man ascends a ladder and starts a kind of monologue which ranges over the role of Men and Women throughout history, with some kind of quirky philosophy thrown in.

"You can either have a short happy life or long miserable life!" He declares with one hand raised. "Have a short happy life picking through the rubbish od Mombai, or long miserable life in a developed contry"

I particularly liked his slightly ecclesiastical costume; and I have to say if I had such a costume I would wear it when I'm teaching. In fact I liked his style. He semed slightly familiar to me.

So what will I do when I get home?

I'll tell you what I'll do.

I'm going to make a large lime jelly which is green and cold and quivers; and I'm going to eat it with cold red grapes and some plain yhogurt.

I'm going to get the mower out of the shed and I am going to mow the lawn, carfully, neatly, slowly.

I'm going to play the piano when the house is empty; I shall sing at the top of my voice.

I will fiddle around with the pond and maybe add a few more bedding plants round the edge; get the fountain going, watch the water drops make patterns on the surface of the pond. Maybe there will be a frog.

I will go to the gym and have a swim and long hot sweat in tha sauna; sweat out the dust of the journey.

Oh yes . . . I must make an appointment to see the doctor as well.
Here's an old old lyric for you - one of my favourites ever since I was a teenager:

"I carry the dust of a journey
That cannot be shaken away,
Yet it lives deep within me,
For I breathed it in everyday"

(Emerson Lake and Palmer - Pictures at an exhibition)


And so gentle reader, until we meet again - with love

Me
Mum
& the world

The road to Akaroa (Let the pictures do the talking)

Via Geraldine to Akaroa on the Banks peninsula. A drive like no other.

Tomorrow packing and organising.

With love

Me
Mum
& The World

Akaroa (Let the pictures do the talking)

Doyles

The road to Ruapuna was a lovely drive. I had the impression I was in somewhere like the midwest. Long straight roads, and flat lands. The instructions given to us by Adrienne where pinpoint accurate and by mid afternoon we were in the land that Margan came from.

And what an incredible place to look at. A large flat plain which ends at the foot of Mount Peel. Mount peel with slightly misty shadows in purples, dark brown, blacks and nearly a blue colour. Slightly shrouded in a thin mist. Absolutely incredible.

I could so easily imagine a young Margan on a pony making her way down a track, dust kicked up by the hooves. Behind us as we drove a plume of white dust thrown up from the unmade road by our wheels seemed to echo that thought.

We came to Ruapuna mid afternoon, which seemed to consist of a cross roads with a small church a hall, plus one homestead. We took a few pictures and then - being slightly too early, checked their driveway, and moved on. Driving empty dusty roads that stretched for ever.

You have to actually experience this place to get any sense of it; such apparently endless roads; huge fields with big piles of stones gathered together in them in large mounds. Massive irrigation machines stretching thier matallic wings over the fields of - what was it? Kale? Maybe. A place of a different scale and space than I have ever seen before.

Eventually we drove down the long drive to Neil and Adrienne's homestead. Rang the brass bell that hung outside the door.

Adrienne came to the door, an elegant smiling lady, very smartly dressed. Then Neil thin, red faced, with some kind of mischivious twinkle in his eye. I had the feeling that we were going to get on well straight away. And we did.

I was installed in a what Neil described as the "The dog box" - actually a rather nice little room (en suite) off the garage.

We had a few drinks and nibbles on a verandah and I marvelled at the Garden which sported a pond to make mine at home look like a puddle, a white sculpture nestling in a shaped border, lovely trees.

This was the house where Grandma Doyle lived, (that's my Great Grandmother - I think). Neil is Mum's second cousin (again I think). The family tree came out - (the one drawn in a criclular fashion) and although I could see myself and Geg on the map - I couldn't quite work out the relationships bewtween people I didn't know. I have a copy of this at home, and when I get back I will post it up here for general presusal. I expect a lot of you will know it.


Neil, was self effacing, but it transpired had been a racing driver. The following potted biography is from Adriene:

"He raced for about 8 years starting with saloon cars - originally just one, a highly modified Anglia, to which he had fitted a corvette motor and it went like a robber's dog! He had quite a bit of success in that and then he moved onto single seater race cars, namely a Begg Formula 5000 and then, while he was in England bought John Surtee's Formula one car and had quite a bit of success with that in New Zealand also.

He gave up once we were married to concentrate on farming, anyway he could not afford both race cars and me!!!! Just for the record, we have 2 sons, one married and running the farm and the other a helicopter pilot in Australia. Neil could now be best described as semi retired from the farm as James is pretty much the manager."

After a lovely evening drinking wine and eating local mutton, an evening laced with laughter and fun I retired to bed very peacefully.

In the morning we were taken by Neil to a house down the road and (as I understand it) this is where Margan lived as little girl. It belonged to Edward. It's now lived in by a woman called (approriatley) Liz, and the Garden has been worked on and cultivated into a labarynthian set of lawns and trees with borders all around. Lovely.
Again I could imagine Margan wondering around (not the same gardens - they are later) here, sitting under the porch, I could really imagine it.
So it was a really good meeting and I felt that it was the drawing together of the journey, and as we left the Doyle's and headed west back towards the sea I was so glad we had come all this way.

Hondo and Sachmo

One day we decided to walk to a bar that Mum had read about in The Lonely Planet, it is apparently called "Sachmo's" and on a Sunday afternoon they have music and do gourmet pizzas. What a good combination.

So despite the rather long walk we set off with hope in a=our hearts and knowing that there was a good sit-down and food at the end of it.

The walk took us along the Avon river northwest out of town. It was a beautiful walk with lovely weeping trees bending over the river in dignified silence. Reflected in the shimmering water.

When we had walked the whole length of this particular road with no sign of Sachmo's we found a coffee shop staffed by a young blonde woman who looked at us askance when I asked about where Sachmo's was. We were not the kind of people she expected to go there perhaps?

"Git a lung wark" she said

(Note about the NZ accent: The word "desk" is prounonced "Disk" the word "Lid" is pronouned a little like "led" crossed with "lud")

Anyway we walked back along the road still couldn't find it. Eventually we went into an Asian shop to ask if they had heard of it. There were three chineese men in there and they all whipped out maps and started to look at them and discuss in hurried Chinese our request. This went on for a long time and mainly I could only see the tops of there heads (balding mostly).

One of the men seized the Lonely Planet book and deciphering the text announced: "I find" and marched out of the shop with the book and and therefore us following. We knew the address and had been up and down the street ourselves, but in his opinion we just had not looked hard enough. We arrived in the street and he stood there lookingat the numbers and then said

"Maybe it this one?" pointing at what was clearly a domestic house.
"No I don't think it is" I said "Its the wrong number anyway."
"I ask" he crossed the road into another domestic garden where a man was minding his own business smoking a ciggerette.
"Never 'erd of it mite" the book was put closer to the man's eyes and the question was asked again.
"No Mite. . ."

Undeterred the man walked further along the street. I asked him his name "Hondo" he said, and what was he doing here? "PHD in agriculture" and with that he was up another driveway to knock on a door. This man was not giving up!

After a long conversation with a confused man at the door of his house he came out of the Garden again "Maybe this?" he indicated a Garden Centre.

It took me sometime to get the Lonely Planet back off him and then we walked back to town quite exhausted.

I feel it's safe to say this man WILL get his PHD and is probably still enquiring up and down the street in search of Sachmo's

The Gondola (Cable car)

We took a couple of buses to a cable car which took us up to 500m (1500ft) above sea level over the 945 meters. On a clear day there would have been 360° views extending over Pegasus Bay and the Pacific Ocean towards Kaikoura; as well as over the Banks Peninsula. Below nestles Lake Ellesmere and Lyttleton Harbour.

One of the main reasons we went there is that in reading Margan's account of her childhood in New Zealand she describes how they left NZ from Lyttleton harbour. As the ship set sail and left the shore they realised that they had left all their trunks and cases on the bank. Margan's Dad was outraged and an angry but there was nothing they could do. So on the voyage, Mum says, the other passengers went through thier belongings and found material and made them a new set of rather peculiar clothes.

It reminds me of "The Hunting Of The Snark" by Lewis Carrol

There was one who was famed for the number of things
He forgot when he entered the ship:

His umbrella, his watch, all his jewels and rings,

And the clothes he had bought for the trip.

He had forty-two boxes, all carefully packed,

With his name painted clearly on each:

But, since he omitted to mention the fact,

They were all left behind on the beach.

The loss of his clothes hardly mattered, because

He had seven coats on when he came,

With three pairs of boots - but the worst of it was,

He had wholly forgotten his name.

(This interface won't let me get the spacing right!)

At the top of ride as well as the usual visitor centre selling plastic Tikis, All Black Rugby shirts, and stuffed Kiwi toys, it was possible to go out and walk around a path.

It took me a while to realise the scale of what I was looking at. The whole lake / sea when you look down on the harbour is in fact a huge crator from a massive ancient erruption that threw up the hills around the water. Where the water is the hole that was left by the erruption. To appreciate the size that this must have been yu have to actually be there. It staggers belief.

Me

Mum

& The World