The Ahuroa Hall

 

 

 

 

 

Every country district had a hall in those days. It was the gathering place where people got together. Dances, school concerts, the weekly table tennis club nights and the monthly meeting of the Country Women’s Institute. Any time the community gathered it would be at the hall. Most of these district halls  had been built around 1880 as the country areas became more established and hard won grass replaced the bush. As the farms developed the pioneers felt settled enough to call themselves a community.

 

 

Ahuroa district was settled from 1854 when 19 Maori chiefs signed by making their marks on a deed that sold 13800 acres for 1200 pounds to Queen Wikitoria – Victoria - and her descendants. At that time the valley and its rim of hills were covered in native forest. After the land was surveyed settlers arrived and began the task of clearing the bush by hand. The big trees suitable for timber, such as rimu, totara, kahikatea and kauri were dragged out by bullock teams for milling. The rest of the vegetation was slashed and burnt so grass pastures could be sown.  Land access was by foot, there were no roads, just the muddy tracks cut by the surveyors and the old traditional Maori trails. Ahuroa was more than 50 miles from Auckland along a tenuous link of tracks called optimistically “The Great North Road “.  For the families making new lives far from what they knew as civilization, having a place where they could gather together became very important.       

 

These halls all looked much the same, built of the plentiful native timber; they were small oblong wooden buildings with tall sash windows along the sides and high gable roofs of corrugated iron. After World War One many were renamed Memorial Halls in honor of the local men who had gone to be soldiers for Mother England and never came home again. Their names were commemorated on handsome carved wooden plaques hung inside the hall, or if the district had been able to raise the money, at the base of an impressive military statue erected nearby. These often portrayed a soldier in WW1 uniform with bowed head and lowered rifle. After WW11 inevitably more names would have to be added so the marble soldiers would guard fresh names and grieve again.

 

“Lest we forget” commanded the carved plaques on the statues. Standing significant and prominent they were permanent reminders to all those who gathered  at the little country halls that it was their men, boys who had grown up, lived, worked and probably married in their district who were buried in faraway countries. Local men who died for strangers who wouldn’t have even known the names of the places these men called home. Places with singsong Maori names like Ahuroa, Paparoa, Hoteo, Tomarata, Matakana, Maungatoroto and Matakohe. To fight and die for King and Country was thought an honorable obligation in 1950’s New Zealand that still treasured its ties to “ the old country “.

 

Every year before dawn on the 25^th of April a ceremony would be held at these memorials to honor those who had served in both World Wars. The date was the anniversary of the 1915 landing of the Australian and New Zealand forces, the Anzacs, at Gallipoli in the Dardanelles. One in four of the 2721 New Zealanders who landed on those beaches, died there. We all wore red poppies on Anzac Day in remembrance. “At the going down of the sun and in the morning we will remember them” was the prayer as the notes of the Last Post were played and the sun came up on small groups of people gathered at countless memorials all over the country. We all remembered and we were proud of our country’s war effort. My Dad and his three brothers had gone away to the Second World War. They fought in Egypt and Italy. Mum’s brother our Uncle Rodney had been Greece and Crete. Our family was lucky all of them had come home safely.

 

 

 At Ahuroa the hall had a little porch entry where you could hang up your hat and coat before you went through double doors into the main hall. On a summer night when  a dance was being held these doors would be left open so bright piano accordion and fiddle music would come bouncing out into the night.

The floor, of wide wooden planks had been polished to a sheen by years of dancing feet. Simple wooden benches lined the sides for seating. Here was where there unmarried girls would sit in  a chattering row, dressed in their best, full skirted dresses with layers of stiff petticoats and carefully waved home permed hair, all waiting to be asked to dance. “The Ladies “room was conveniently behind them, so if one felt she was in danger of becoming a wallflower she could discreetly retire to rearrange her petticoats and pull even tighter the wide white belt that cinched her waistline. Everybody knew that boys liked the girls with slim waistlines the best.

 

 

One night I remember we gathered at the hall for a “Welcome to the District “ for the Browns, a new family that had bought a dairy farm down at the opposite end of the valley to ours. All of the adults would do their best to make sure Mr and Mrs Brown felt at home but amongst the children it was a different story. Three new girls, Marilyn, Gaylene and Laureen, at our little school had already changed established groups of best friends and a round of competition for favor had begun. Being the one to take a newcomer under your wing and walk arm in arm with her around the playground was like parading a new possession. At the hall most of the girls would be anxious to be seen as the best candidate for new best friend. I wasn’t worried about winning any such favor, I had Prue for my best friend and we had our very own horses, Thunder and Tuffet, in our opinion we needed no other status. Of course if it had been new boys coming to school things would have been settled in a much more straightforward manner; a few fist fights around the back of the shelter shed and everyone’s ranking would have been quickly re-established.    

 

 

At the hall these occasions were catered by the “Ladies bring a Plate” method. Every woman going to the event would make something to take as her family’s contribution towards the evening’s supper. For us kids this was the main feature of the night. We got the chance to try all the goodies that other people’s mothers baked. It was like a buffet of manna from heaven for children.

 

 

Mum made cream puffs. Of all the ladies in the valley she was the best at making these. She made them in the afternoon, beating egg yolks into her pastry dough to make it soft and fluffy. They came out of the oven all puffed up and golden and when they were cool she filled them with whipped cream. Just before we set out she put them on a good china plate, carefully covered with a clean tea towel and put them into her egg basket. She balanced it all carefully on her knee in the car as Dad drove us the 5 miles to the hall.

 

When we arrived, into the supper room went Mum and her cream puffs. We wouldn’t see those cream puffs gain until supper time half way through the evening. I hoped she had made enough so I would get one. Mum was very strict about letting us have any off her plate. Children had to mind their manners and wait until after the adults had gone first at supper time.    

 

The Supper room was where the ladies of the hall committee gathered. It was their job to get everything ready. They set out the cups and saucers and filled the hot water cylinder so it was ready to boil to make huge pots of tea. They put the finishing touches to the food. There were sponges to be decorated with whipped cream. It was wintertime so they were topped with slices of home preserved peaches. In the summertime it would be freah strawberries or passion fruit, homegrown of course. Chocolate cake had to be cut into wedges, sausage rolls had to be heated, asparagus rolls and club sandwiches arranged attractively on their plates. There were plates of shortbread, sponge kisses with blackberry jam sticking them together, chocolate log, ginger slices, Louise cakes, sweet meringues, savory eggs, pikelets, Madeira cake and buttered date loaf; all of the best the country kitchens of Ahuroa could produce.

 

Would there be enough? Oh yes there was always more than enough.

 In those days it seemed every woman had her specialty and for an occasion at the hall she would excel herself. We kids had our favorites, we knew who made the best of what we loved and those were the plates we hovered around.

 

The men gathered by the hall door greeting each other with easy familiarity. The talk was of gorse spraying, the cost of spreading super phosphate fertilizer and the price cattle had fetched at the last Kaipara Flats stock sale. They were all dressed in their best, shirt and tie with jacket. Most had braces holding up their woolen “good” trousers.

 

Later on when the evening was in full swing, the jackets would come off and you would see sweat on the brows of these outdoor men. Their collars stayed tightly buttoned and ties knotted, faces intent they put as much energy into their dancing they did into their daily work. Some were natural dancers and could make the stoutest lady seem as light on her feet as a fairy. Our neighbors, wiry little Keith Wilson and his wife Mel, of a more generous figure, glided serenely and smoothly through the throng of dancers.  

 

 

No alcohol was allowed in the hall, but you could be sure there would be a few dozen beers disguised in brown paper bags and safely hidden in the boots of various cars. Men would discretely visit to refresh themselves. This façade of decency was accepted by everyone, but any man getting at all ‘tipsy’ was kept outside and not allowed in to dance with the ladies. I don’t think Dad ever visited the cars, if he did he was very careful not to let Mum know. They had an agreement about drinking that meant Dad wasn’t allowed to. Mum said he had done too much boozing in the war and she had only agreed to come and live at Ahuroa if he left the beer alone.

 

Joey Tolhopf was the leader of the band that played at our dances. He and all of the men in his band were descendants of the Bohemians who had settled Puhoi the next door valley to ours. These men had music in their blood, playing accordions, fiddles and the piano without a sheet of music between them. Up on the stage Joey announced “Gentlemen please take your partners for the first waltz,” and the hall came alive. The room glowed in yellow fluorescent lighting, the band struck up the opening bars of a sprightly Stauss Waltz. The young men stampeded down the hall to pluck the most popular girls from their perches with the formal request, “May I have the honor of this dance?” John and the other boys who had been happily sliding up and down the hall scattered. Dad got Mum from the supper room and escorted her onto the floor, her green dress looked pretty. She wore a cameo brooch pinned at the neckline and her white high heeled shoes were the ones she had worn for her wedding when Dad came home from the war. Dad was smiling at her; Mum was a very good dancer.

 

The dances were called in a parade of old favorites. In 1954 Auckland teenagers might have been learning to Rock n Roll but at Ahuroa they still danced the Three Step Polonaise, the Foxtrot and the Quickstep with style and enthusiasm. Some dances were more difficult to do, the beautiful courtly Valetta gave the older couples a chance to show off, husbands wheeling and promenading their wives around the floor. Their steps matched each others, never missing a beat, weaving a dance as true as their marriage vows.

 

I remember vividly when an elderly couple, Great Uncle and Aunt, Charlie and Lou Parker seemed to catch fire to a quick melody of the accordion and fiddle. They laughed as they swept into an old fashioned dance no one else could do. Joey Tolopf tapped his feet and changed the rhythm to match. I had never seen any thing quite like this before, it was a polka, a fast stepping polka. Charlie swung Lou around and around in skipping steps, her shiny black dress swung up and I saw her little feet were tightly buttoned into a pair of black boots like the one I had found by the gate that first day we had arrived at the farm. On Lou’s feet, her boots went dancing, stepping out to the lively music.

 

Charlie held his wife firmly in the small of her back. She was so little her arms had to reach way up to hold her husband; her right arm outstretched, reaching to place her hand in his. Her face was shining and smiling, her hair stayed tight and neat in her old fashioned bun as she bobbed up and down. Charlie looked over her head and steered a path for them around the dance floor. Everyone else fell back and left the floor clear for them. Charlie and Lou skipped and stomped out their polka until they were breathless.

 

 

 

 

Waltzes were used to break up the dance program. When the supper waltz was called, you knew all that that glorious food was coming up after the dance. For the older girls having a boy ask her to dance the supper waltz with him meant he would fetch a plate of supper and then sit beside her while she ate, a sure sign of serious courting. Who asked who to dance was quickly noted by the married ladies. Some girls confident in their own beauty and the attraction of their swirly dresses or perhaps not wanting to be claimed by any one in particular, got up to dance with each other without waiting to be asked.

Playing ‘hard to get’ said the ladies in the supper room, but no one wanted to be seen as sitting and waiting for a partner for the supper waltz.     

 

 

After supper no one took much notice of the children so we girls gave up practicing dancing with each other and joined the boys in running around the edge of the dance floor. Between dances we ran up and down sprinkling extra talcum powder on the floor to keep it smooth and slippery for the dancers. John, his knees white from sliding in the talcum, and the other boy dare devils would sneak outside and report back on which car the men had beer in.

 

The dance floor was crowded, all the young men emboldened by supper or perhaps by  enough trips to the car boots, now had the courage to ask girls to dance. The ladies had finished in the kitchen so they pulled their husbands out of the male group by the door and onto the dance floor. Everyone loved the partner swapping in the Three Step Polonaise. After each quick stepping circle around the floor, the girls were whirled around and released into the arms of the next man. Every so often a man with his favorite girl in his arms would side step the letting go and whirl her way around the floor again.

 

  

About midnight Joey Tolhopf announced “Gentlemen please take your partners for the last dance.” The band played “The Tennessee Waltz and “Now is the Hour “bittersweet and romantic melodies to wind up the evening. Most people would sing the words

“Now is the hour

When we must say goodbye

Soon you’ll be sailing

Far across the sea”

as they waltzed. They all knew them from hearing Vera Lyn on wartime radio. Mothers began to pick up their tired children and gathered up things for the men to carry out to the cars. Within a few minutes the only people remaining were those committee members designated to clean up the old hall and leave it ready for another occasion. The evening was over and tomorrow would be another farm day with early starts to milk cows and do the chores.       

 

As we drove home in the dark Mum and Dad chatted to each other, sharing all the bits of news of the evening. Mum’s egg basket on her knee was empty of cream puffs. There were never any of these left to take home after supper. John, Clare and I were quiet, too tired to scuffle or argue with each other in the back seat of the little Ford Prefect. I leant my cheek on the cold window of the car. I couldn’t see very far into the dark and I couldn’t imagine I was riding Thunder in my best dress. Anyway my head was full of polka music and the sight of Great Aunt Lou dancing in her beautiful little black boots.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cemetery

 

I liked the graveyard by our gate. It was a jungle of fern and flowers, overgrown headstones and fallen down grave markers. Here cheery yellow and white Dog Daisies and bright pink spires of Watsonia flowers bloomed all summer long. Taking away most of the gruesome fascination children usually have for graveyards. In fact I had a very possessive attitude towards the Ahuroa cemetery and always felt quite important about the fact that the biggest headstone belonged to our family.

 

It was our great grandfather and our great grandmother who were buried there. Their headstone was marble, tall and white with their names inscribed in black curvy letters.

 

Albert Oswald Parker Born….Died……

And his wife Louisa Born….Died…..

( I’ll get the correct inscriptions and put in here )

 

I didn’t know it then but our Great Great grandparents were also buried there, their graves unmarked and buried in the fern. These old people had come to New Zealand from England in 1862.  

 

I had worked it out, Old Albert and Louisa were our Poppa’s parents and he was our mum’s father, her name was Edna Beatrice Parker before she married our Dad and became a Bradley.

 

There was another family grave also lying there, marked by a small slab and headstone. This was Alice, she was one of Poppa’s sisters and she had died when she was only nine years old.

“It was Diptheria caught from rotten drains,” said Mum. “Don’t go playing in any drains you kids”. Of course we heeded her words, but John and I did think it was important we checked the open drain by the house to see if we could actually see Diptheria bugs swimming in the grey mud. We would stir the sludge up with a stick keeping a sharp eye out so Mum didn’t catch us.

 

Maybe it was because the cemetery was beside the road, right where we waited for the school bus and where the Wilson’s cream cans waited for the Cream Truck, that it never seemed too spooky a place. There was a dark belt of tall Ti tree and scrappy gorse that screened it from our house paddock, but apart from that the graveyard lay in the open sunshine. We played there, making up wild extravagant games about secret treasure and pirate burials. John and I relived Kidnapped and Treasure Island acting out sword fights and secret meetings, searching through the fern for the signs marked on our own Pirates’ Treasure Map. These games always had a delicious thrill to them; you never knew just what you might find.

 

Most of the graves had all but disappeared. Whoever was buried there was long forgotten, never even known by the current residents of the valley. But although their names had  blown away in dust, vanishing as their wooden crosses disintegrated over the years, we kids knew they were there. We found hollows when making tunnels in the fern. Places where the earth had sunk down back into the graves over time. John was good at describing how long it would have taken for the coffin to have rotted so the ground could cave in like that and whether there would still be bones down there. In fact John’s stories also included the theory that all of the fern and flowers grew so well because of what lay under them.

 

 

 

I was quite happy to skip about all over any of the other grave slabs but I never would walk on Old Albert’s. I would never show such disrespect to my Great Grandfather, in fact I felt it was important to keep him on our side, incase he had become a ghost. After all we were living in his house, the house he had died in. If we weren’t careful maybe he would start haunting us. Dad still used his branding iron of a capital A circled by an O, his name was Albert Oswald, to burn our ownership onto the wool bales. I didn’t think that would upset him but his horse hair sofa was in our playroom off the back verandah and we kids played spooky games there, dressing ourselves up in sheets and being pretend ghosts. Now that could offend a real ghost couldn’t it? 

 

 Even more significant, we had found an old china cup with a special rim designed for men with moustaches to drink tea from when we first arrived at the farm.  Mum had put it away, high up in a cupboard.

“You kids can leave this alone,” she said.

So if it was that important it must have been Old Albert’s cup, of that I was certain and took it to be a sign that he could still be around and therefore worthy of respect as a potential ghost.

 

 

I developed Ancestor worship rituals that involved Clare and I picking flowers out of Mum’s garden and then parading in a solemn procession up the paddock to the cemetery and placed them in jam jars on the family graves. Sometimes we had extra burying business to carry out as well with a dead hedgehog or mouse corpse I had retrieved from Smokey the cat to be interred. These were carried with suitable solemnity in cardboard coffins made from Sunlight soap boxes decorated with flowers. We would bury them in one corner I particularly liked, where it was clear of fern and there were no old hollows in the ground. After all I didn’t want to upset any other older occupants. We marked the new graves with wooden crosses carefully inscribed with names and details such as:

“ Prickles the  Hedgehog

Died in sleep

12^th Day of May 1955

Rest in Peace “

 .

 

The next door grave to our great grandparents’ belonged to Mr and Mrs Nash. Their son Kenny still owned the farm down the hill next door to Wilson’s our neighbour’s. This grave was one of a different style, the headstone small and square with a nice pattern in tiles on the slab. It also had marble chips scattered on it which I felt was an unfair advantage in graveside accessories, so I would gather them up and sprinkle them on Old Albert and Louisa’s when we were doing our flower laying ceremonies. I was somewhat miffed if next time I looked the chips were back on the Nash side and once, as if to prove the point…my posy had been put on top of Mrs Nash as well.

 

One time I remember there was to be a new burial  in the cemetery and Old Karl Wilson, our neighbor had to find an empty plot. Old Karl was one of the oldest men in the valley, so I suppose he had more chance of remembering who was buried where. That day he came with his gum spear to poke deep into the ground to see if he could feel any coffins. This long narrow spear was the type used by the kauri gum diggers of the north as they searched the swamps for valuable gum. When pushed deep you could feel anything solid way down in the earth with the tip of the spear. Time and time again we watched Old Karl push that spear down, touch something, and then draw it up again, rejecting that spot as already occupied.

 

John, Clare and I lay spread eagled with our ears pressed to the ground hoping to hear a distant thud as the spear touched something impressive like a coffin or maybe a sort of clunk that would mean, Oh glorious horror, bones! Old Karl methodically kept on with his search ignoring our sequence of sucked in breath strangled silences as he pushed the spear down and felt around deep in the ground , punctuated by a barrage of rapid chatter as he drew it up again.  

“Try here, try here!” John was urgent and bossy.

“Who has died Mr Wilson?” Me - wanting to visualize the person laid out in their coffin..

“Who will dig the hole?” Clare- being practical.

“Have you dug up bones before?” John - looking for gruesome detail.

“How many people are buried here?” Clare – wanting the facts.

“Have you ever seen a ghost?” Me – hoping that if he had it was Old Albert.

 

His patience must have been stretched or perhaps it was Clare’s last question.

“Who will do this when you die Mr Wilson?”

Old Karl suddenly paused with the spear deep in the ground. “Here you kids,” he said, “feel this.”  Biting our tongues to concentrate, John and I held the spear as he juggled it up and down. There it was quite distinct, a tap tap tap. The tip of the spear touched something hard deep in the earth and then, I swear, we felt it move. We leapt back, shocked, dropped the spear and bolted for the cemetery gate. Clare was way ahead of us, blonde hair flying, short legs pounding, she shrieked as she ran for home.

“Mum! Mum! Watch out it’s a SKELLINGTON!”