Mary Ellen Robertson
My grandmother, Mary Ellen Matthews née Robertson, died whilst I was finishing my final engineering exams at Ardmore in November 1967. I visited the funeral home in Hamilton East but did not go to the service. Her last years had been peaceful at Tokonui Hospital near Te Awamutu; but before that dementia and old age drove my mother Cathie and my uncle Doug to despair. Although the asthma which had haunted her for years seemed no longer to be an issue, she often confused me for Doug, asked if I had finished milking, and had a tendency to disappear up the road towards the Mormon Temple from Dinsdale in West Hamilton where Mum was living in the 1960s.
I also have happier memories - of haymaking and blackberry picking on the farm in Whakahongi Road and morning teas spread out beside the hay. I remember her stories from the Depression when dodgy relatives arrived by taxi without any money expecting food and accommodation and asking her to pay the taxi. There are her letters in my mother's papers from when we were in England in 1957, and occasional insights into life on Whakahongi Road from the scraps of information I continue to discover: her pattern book for dress-making, the receipe book of her mother, post-cards from her brothers Donald and John in France during the War (Donald was a miner in Waihi and a Tunneller in Arras), a letter to a cousin in Clinton and a rare visit to the South Island. My feet can easily find their way to her grave in Te Aroha - a link with someone who showed me a level of understanding which surprised me as an adolescent and still does.
The old house at the farm seems so much smaller as a hay-barn than it still looms in my imagination from the 1950s and 60s when we often stayed there and where every room remains vivid in its character and detail. The wooden steps from the porch which caught the morning sun, the path to the outside loo, and the washhouse where a flush toilet was installed and the copper removed. Doug's endless supply of war stories like Reach for the Sky and The Great Escape. The hundreds of preserving jars crowding dark unpainted wooden shelves under the tankstand. The family dining table in the sun-porch perpetually covered in newspapers. The crank-handle, party-line, telephone on the wall in the kitchen, the bathroom off the lounge whose taps gave you an electric shock, the fireplace where Doug got fires going by holding a newspaper across it to get a draught and sometimes the paper itself caught. The mantlepiece which held endless rubber bands, bits of string and brown paper, and a life-time collection of things that might be useful, one day. You never knew.
It was not the first house that Mary and Ernest had lived in. Also still standing is a two-roomed shed now on poles they lived in for several years waiting for the timber to build their permanent home. I always knew it was where my grandparent's had first lived.
Mary and Ernest married in the Registrar's Office in Morrinsville 3 March 1920. They took a month's holiday travelled to the South Island and stayed in Clinton with Ernie's sister Florence and visited his brother Sydney who had kept the family name German whereas Ernie and others took their mother's name of Matthews. In Dunedin they admired the begonia's in the Botanic Gardens and visited Sydney and Edith's daughter Evered then a boarding pupil at St Hilda's College. At the end of May 1920 Mary wrote to Edith that Evered (14) "seemed so happy" and that she did not think "the training or life at the school will spoil Evered or cause her to become proud."
Back in Tatuanui Mary reported that
"Ernie is very busy getting the farm in order and as there is a great deal to be done he works fairly hard. Our house timber has not come along yet so we are comfortably settled in our little two rooms for the winter. There is something really nice about a wee place though, and of course less work to be done"
Mary became pregnant almost immediately and Cathie was born on the 9th of February 1921. Mary had a still-born boy in May 1923 and then Doug a year later on 26 May 1924, the year that electricity came along the road, and it was possible to get a milking machine so that Mary and Ernest no longer had to milk the cows by hand for however long it took. As Cathie recalled "machine milking was not an evolution, it was a revolution."
Mary had had more of a dairying background than Ernest and had grown up milking by hand on the family farm. Cows were important. The loss of any stock was one of the hard aspects of farming, because, as Cathie recalled, "their future livelihood was tied up with the cows - from the time they were calves they had to be reared through the yearling and heifer stages to become milking cows. There weren't any vets then and the loss of an animal was a dreadful catastrophe . . . when things went well the calves grew into healthy yearlings and springing heifers there was a lot of satisfaction."
It was a era of just having to cope with whatever happend, from accidents to childbirth. Money, and feed for the animals was long a cause of anxiety. One year a whole stack of hay was lost in a fire and with it went the winter feed stock for the animals.
Feeding hens was a life-long love and from the time that Ernest and Mary first worked together to get the farm going in 1920 they were essential.
"I have a few hens and ducks but get no eggs at all although I feed them very well. Eggs have never been so scarce up here that I remember. We have only one little cow in milk but she gives more than we can use of milk and butter and of course Devonshire cream."
My grandmother valued education - encouraging my mother and later me in our academic studies - and she often lamented she had had so little, but she knew how to write well and she was a reader of poetry and New Zealand literature. She often quoted Burns "my love is like a red red rose." Old copies of the National Geographic were always around the house along with the Auckland Weekly News. The Australian Post with its suggestive cartoons was something I only found in other people's houses.
Mary also read the King James Bible, which was of course the bible of her generation, and she somehow got involved with a Cooneyite group meeting on a nearby farm. I was interested to discover later that her grandfather Alex's bible brought out from Scotland had survived, that for a time he had attended a Bretheren church in the Rangitikei, and that the Robertsons had contributed to the building of the Presbyterian Church in Ngarua. She had also been keen to marry off my separated but not yet divorced mother to the bachelor Presbyterian minister in Morrinsville.
When interviewed by her friend Margaret Sing for a thesis on rural women completed at the University of Waikato in 1992, Cathie responded to a question about the relationships between farmers and their wives in those times. Mary had been brought up in a home "where the men mattered" and "the girls were taught right from the beginning that they must do things for their brothers - the men came first - but there was nothing like that in the relationship with my father . . . he had a more protective view of women." "She wasn't unaware of women and women's rights - I knew all about women getting the vote! She was politically mined." "Yet she was proud to be a farmer's wife - the land mattered, to be a farmer's wife, to own land, was a great achievement."
By the time Ernest died of a heart attack on 13 December 1950, Mary's own health was becoming fragile. Asthma was an ongoing problem for which there was little effective treatment. and chest problems were common in the district with its swamps and fogs. She spent time in a rest home in Tauranga. Memory issues were becoming apparent, though it was about ten years before her dementia became serious. On top of running the farm, the task of minding the house fell to Doug,
When Doug and Ellen were married in November 1959 at least running the house was shared, but it was not easy for any of them. Sometimes Mary went to stay with Cathie in Hamilton, but it was increasing impossible to leave her alone. Mary's going to Tokanui Mental Hospital appeared as the only solution - yet it proved much more satisfactory than might have been imagined. Doug's words to me that it was just like dealing with any other illness were helpful. Mary appeared surprisingly content. She died peacefully on 3 November 1967.
