Aunt Effie and the Island That Sank Read online

  The tide had come in, so Aunt Effie rolled us like barrels up the plank. As we climbed into our hammocks, a honky-tonk piano in the Lady Bowen played “You Are My Sunshine” and, on the scow behind us, somebody was playing “Mother Machree” on an accordion.

  When they came to, “God bless you and keep you, Mother Machree!” somebody said, “That’s for you, Mother Machree!” and there was a thump and a splash. Aunt Effie said, “Saturday night often ends like that in the Thames.”

  “Why do you always say ‘the’ Thames?” asked Lizzie.

  “I don’t know. I suppose I just grew up hearing everybody else saying it, so I say it, too.”

  “Oh,” said Lizzie, but she sounded as if she was already asleep. Then the gas lamps went dim, the lights of the hotels went out, and the shouts and singing faded. We heard Jessie saying, “Tomorrow night I’m going to the rubbity-dub, to the Irish Stew,” and Jared said to her, “What’s the Irish Stew?” and Jessie said, “The Brian Boru!”

  “You’re far too young to be even thinking of going near an hotel!” Daisy said. “And even when you are old enough, you must have a chaperon.”

  We heard Jessie trying to mumble, “What’s a chaperon?” then we must have all gone to sleep because we were waking up with bells ringing inside our heads, and Daisy saying, “Everybody up! Put on your best clothes. We’re going to church.”

  Lizzie and Jessie held the bottle of iron pyrites and the gold nugget and asked, “Can we go to Greasy Mick and Son’s for breakfast?”

  “We haven’t time for church or breakfast,” said Aunt Effie, not if we’re going to get under the Kopu bridge before the tide comes in too far.” She had the dinghy floating astern on the heavy rope we used for towing.

  “Kopu,” said Casey. “Is that the place where Wicked Nancy’s Island sank?”

  Chapter Nine

  Ghosting Up the Waihou River; the New Kopu Bridge; Cannibal Eels, Mr Firth and His Big Ideas; Getting a Bit on the Nose; the Okauia Springs; and “The Babes in the Woods”.

  “Tsk! Tsk! Tsk!” said Daisy. We looked over our stern and saw the crew of the trading scow fast asleep on its deck, the huge stack of firewood still on the wharf.

  “That’s the trouble with Saturday night in the Thames,” Aunt Effie said. “They’re going to miss the tide again. Come on! We’ve got to get under the Kopu bridge, and we don’t want to miss Saturday night in Paeroa!”

  We didn’t remind her we’d already had two Saturday nights that week. We towed out the Margery Daw stern first. There was no wind on deck, but the topsails picked up enough for us to ghost up the Waihou River.

  At every mangrove tree standing in the water, the little ones cried, “There’s the island that sank!” After a while, they gave up. Then they saw a tea-tree stake sticking out of the water and screamed, “Wicked Nancy’s Island!”

  “The tea-tree stakes mark the edge of the channel. Leave them to starboard going upriver, to port coming down,” Aunt Effie said to Marie at the wheel. The little ones looked disappointed.

  The river was so wide, and the new Kopu bridge so long, we couldn’t see where it began and finished. Aunt Effie stuck her fingers in her mouth, whistled, and some men started galloping on horses towards its centre span.

  “Tide’s pretty low,” said Aunt Effie, “but we’ll never get under. We’ll have to strike our topmasts.”

  Before we could do that, the men reached the centre span and began turning winch handles. The whole middle section of the bridge groaned and swung till it pointed upstream and we could get through the gap without lowering the topmasts. Several buggies and a couple of wagons waited on the Auckland side. On the Thames side a leading dog held back a mob of cattle beasts. The drover sat his horse behind them. Further back, his pack-horse came clopping along the bridge, catching up.

  “Good boy,” Ann said as we sailed past the leading dog who was being threatened by a black poley steer.

  “If that beast goes in the river, the cannibal eels will get it,” said Aunt Effie. We looked at each other. “Cannibal eels!” Jazz mouthed silently.

  Alwyn mooed, and the black cattle beast got such a shock it backed from the edge. Then we were past, the centre of the bridge closed behind us, and the buggies and wagons and steers started crossing again.

  Between flax swamps, occasional farms, scrub, and patches of kahikatea, we sailed up the Waihou for months, past the end of tidal water. Several times we saw headless cows wandering around, unable to feed or even moo. Once it was a horse which kept turning around to look at the stump where its tail had been. One poor cow was balancing itself just on its front legs. Its back half had been bitten off.

  Aunt Effie shook her head and said, “Those cannibal eels… It’s not just the horses and cows. A few farmers have disappeared, too.”

  When we wanted to swim, she just said, “I wouldn’t,” and we thought of the cannibal eels. We didn’t even like to dangle our feet over the side.

  At Paeroa, Aunt Effie said it was Thursday and not worth going ashore. We reached Te Aroha a few weeks later, but it was still Thursday, so we kept on.

  Below the Gordon, men were blasting snags out of the river so Mr Josiah Clifton Firth could run his steamer, the Kotuku, as far up as Stanley Landing behind Matamata, Aunt Effie said. We saw them blow a log on to the bank, and something else, shiny black, thicker than the log, and nearly as long.

  “It moved!” Jane shrieked.

  “I think it’s a …” Jazz’s voice dried up.

  The men tried to raise it over a branch, but the rope broke. They brought a chain, but the branch broke. They brought horses, dragged the thing to a big kahikatea and got the chain over its lower branch. As they pulled, a huge black head with curved ivory tusks lifted off the ground.

  The cannibal eel had been knocked unconscious, but it woke up, bellowed, pulled up the kahikatea by its roots, and started dragging it towards the river. It stopped and looked back.

  “It knows kike’s a sinker,” said Aunt Effie. “If it drags the tree into the river, it’ll drown itself. You watch.”

  Sure enough, the intelligent beast sliced through the chain with its tusks. Now it didn’t have to drag the kike around, it bellowed, chased the men up a willow, and slid back into the river. Water surged across the paddocks as the cannibal eel rushed downstream. Despite her beam, the Margery Daw rocked from side to side.

  “I hope we don’t find Wicked Nancy’s Island up here,” said Lizzie. “I’m not diving with cannibal eels.”

  “A cannibal only eats members of its own species,” Daisy told her. “You’d be perfectly safe!”

  “Aunt Effie said they eat farmers!” said Jessie.

  Daisy smiled and corrected her. “What she actually said was that some farmers disappeared.”

  “All the same …”

  The Margery Daw skimmed upstream over the snags and rocks. The men cheered, and Aunt Effie bowed. She leaned over the bulwarks and said to them: “Sixty-six feet nine inches by eighteen feet six inches – she’s the amazing scow!

  “She’ll lift in less water than it takes to float a mangrove berry. Centre-board up, she’ll skim across a pipi bank on a heavy dew. She’ll sail on the froth and scum on top of the mud before the tide comes in. She’ll slide up a mangrove creek where you’d never get a boat with a keel. And she’ll sail all the way to Sydney fully loaded with only a foot of freeboard, and a thousand fathoms of blue water beneath her centre-board!”

  The men threw their hats in the air and cheered again.

  “And you can tell J.C. Firth, if he’s got any sense, he’ll build himself a scow instead of that steel steamer. It’s going to cost him thousands of pounds, to clear the river.”

  A white bearded man stood on the bank holding a red-wrapped stick of dynamite.

  “Who’s that?” asked Ann.

  “J.C. Firth,” said Aunt Effie.

  “Why don’t you tell him yourself?”

  “He wouldn’t take any notice of a mere woman.”
r />   “You’re no mere woman!” we told Aunt Effie, but she said, “Just look at that man, will you? He’s been handling dynamite, and now he’s rubbing his forehead!”

  The old gentleman put his head in his hands and groaned.

  “He’s gone and given himself a dynamite headache. He’s going to have some other headaches, too. Big ideas – big headaches!”

  Further upstream, Aunt Effie asked if we’d like a swim, but Alwyn ground his teeth like tusks. We shook our heads carefully as if we had dynamite headaches, and Daisy said she felt a cold coming on.

  From up the masts we could see for miles. “Everything you’re looking at is the Firth Estate,” Aunt Effie called up to us. “Some say old J.C. Firth leased it off Wiremu Tamihana and the Ngati-Haua about 1866. Some say he pinched it.”

  “Is it all one farm?”

  “All fifty-six thousand acres.”

  “Fifty-six thousand acres!”

  “Look at that!” said Jazz. A plough was sinking in a swampy bit. Only the handles stuck out of scummy black water. The draught horses struggled but started sinking, too. We watched amazed as the ploughman tore up whole clumps of tea-tree and tied them in bundles.

  “Fascines,” said Daisy who was proud of her wide vocabulary.

  The ploughman knelt below the necks of his drowning draught horses. He lifted them clear of the swamp, and kicked the tea-tree fascines under their hoofs.

  He took the plough handles. “Giddup!” The draught horses found their feet and drew the plough out of the swamp with a sucking noise. We watched it dwindle north across the plain, the single furrow a straight black line.

  “That’s the powerful Mr Given,” said Aunt Effie. “He started ploughing from Matamata this morning. Tonight he’ll finish in Te Aroha. Tomorrow, he’ll turn round his team and plough one furrow all the way back to Matamata. That’s how big the paddocks are on the Firth Estate.”

  “How long does it take to plough a whole paddock?” asked Colleen who was always interested in statistics.

  “About a year,” said Aunt Effie. “Then a year to sow it in wheat. A year to grow. And a year to cut it down. And then J.C. Firth plans to sail his crop up to Auckland and grind it in his flour mill in Fort Street.

  “The only trouble is that he doesn’t know the summer’s too wet here. Before it’s ripe enough to cut, his wheat’s going to sprout and start growing in the ear. It’ll be ruined.

  “He’ll build the road to Cambridge. And he’ll build the Tower on top of Tower Hill. But he’ll go broke and have to sell off his enormous farm.” Aunt Effie looked pleased. Telling us a bit of history always made her feel that she was making up for taking us out of school. “He’ll break up part of his estate into little farms around Hopuruahine, and they’ll build a railway station, a school, and a dairy factory there.”

  “That’s where we live!” we all said.

  Aunt Effie nodded. “Just across there,” she said and pointed west. “It looks different from up the mast of a scow.”

  “It’s not just that,” Marie said. “But we’re not even born yet.”

  “It’s the 1880s,” said Aunt Effie. “Some of you are born or nearly born, and some of you won’t be born for another century, but that doesn’t matter.” She nodded. “There’s Stanley Landing.”

  We looked and saw a concrete jetty and an iron shed waiting for the Kotuku to come and load Mr Firth’s wheat.

  “And there’s the waterfall!” said Jessie. We all looked up at the Kaimais, at Wairere Falls, their white bend against the dark bush.

  “I wonder if we’ll ever go up there?” asked Lizzie.

  “You will,” said Aunt Effie. “Sooner than you think.”

  She picked up a couple of us and sniffed. “Whew! You pong! You haven’t had a swim for several months because Alwyn keeps making cannibal eel noises. That’s why everyone’s getting a bit on the nose.”

  She ran the Margery Daw in against the eastern bank. “See those two tawas? Take a towel and a lump of yellow soap and climb between them. You’ll come to a fence running off into the pigfern. Keep to the right, and you’ll see a patch of white manooker. The other side of it, you’ll see some pongas down the gully, and hot water bubbling out of the ground – what they call the Okauia Springs. Keep following your noses, and you’ll have the best swim of your lives. You can have a good scrub – and wash your hair while you’re about it. I’ll be waiting in the grownups’ pool to give you a hand.”

  We watched Aunt Effie sail upstream. “What if she’s left us here,” said Ann, “and she never comes back?”

  “Like ‘The Babes in the Woods’” cried Jazz.

  “Then we’ll lie down and go to sleep and the birds will cover us with leaves,” cried Beck.

  “And the giant cannibal eel will follow our scent and crawl under the leaves and eat us,” cried Alwyn.

  We all began to cry. All of us except Daisy who said, “There’s the track and the white manooker. Come on!” She picked up the towel and the yellow soap, and we followed, grateful that Daisy was so sensible.

  Chapter Ten

  How Our Bones Went Soft and Bendy in the Hot Water; How We Beat the Scurvy with Spruce Beer; and How We Winched the Margery Daw Uphill and Kedged her Across the Flat Paddocks.

  Tiny bubbles ticked and winked on top of a knee-deep pool of hot water. We wallowed, scrubbed ourselves with the yellow soap, washed our hair, and cried when our eyes stung. Marie showed us how to get cold water out of another pool and hold it to our eyes so they stopped stinging.

  Down the gully, from one hot pool to another, we took turns piggybacking the little ones. They got softer and heavier in each pool. Jessie was like carrying a sack of potatoes, she drooped and wouldn’t hang on. When we reached the long grownups’ pool – surrounded by pongas and bamboo – we wanted somebody to carry us.

  “It’s over my head. I can’t swim to the other end,” said Ann. We all felt like jelly.

  “Who’s going to carry us?” wept the little ones, their arms and legs bendy with the hot water.

  “I told you I’d be here.” Aunt Effie popped up wearing her green canvas bikini. She also wore the scarlet rubber bathing cap which made her look like the terrifying picture she once showed us of somebody who’d been scalped by Redskins. “Hang on around my neck. Gaaargh! Do you want to strangle me?”

  Daisy hung on, then Mabel, Johnny, Flossie, Lynda, Stan, Howard, and the rest of us. A necklace of nephews and nieces, we floated behind Aunt Effie as she dog-paddled to the foot of the grownups’ pool.

  We went headfirst down a slide into the children’s pool. Bubbles coming through the pebbles tickled up our legs. The little ones laughed and said it was like piddling. We’d been in the hot water so long, our skin was puffy. When we tried to stand up, our bones had gone soft.

  Aunt Effie pushed us down a chute into the river where the water was so cold our bones turned straight and strong again. We took the little ones, swam across with the current, ran up the far side, and found another pool so hot our puffy old skin peeled off, and we looked all pink and new.

  It was dark now. “Quick,” said Aunt Effie, “before the flesh falls off your skeletons!” She pulled us out of the hot water, gave us a candle each to hold, dropped us in the cold river, and we floated back downstream.

  “Daisy-Mabel-Johnny-Flossie-Lynda-Stan-Howard-Marge-Stuart-Peter-Marie-Colleen-Alwyn-Bryce-Jack-Ann-Jazz-Beck-Jane-Isaac-David-Victor-Casey-Lizzie-Jared-Jess! Sing so I don’t lose any of you in the dark!”

  We sang “God Defend Waharoa” and “My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean” very loudly so we didn’t get lost. Aunt Effie swam round, counting us and shouting our names. We made such a din, Caligula, Nero, Brutus, Kaiser, Genghis, and Boris woke on the scow and bayed.

  Our candles reflecting like stars on the river, we followed the terrible noise of the dogs and saw the side of the Margery Daw, a black wall. “We’re too tired to climb the rope ladder,” said Jane, but Alwyn ground his teeth like a cannibal eel, and we scramb
led over the top of the little ones and on to the deck.

  “My bones are hard again,” said Lizzie.

  “We should have tied knots in your legs while they were soft,” said Alwyn. “You’d be easier to catch when we want you.”

  “Look how long I’ve been in the water!” Casey’s fingertips were pale and puckered with little pleats.

  “That means your skin’s stretched,” said Alwyn. “Don’t jump suddenly, or you might pop out of it.” But the little ones were too tired even to cry. They kept falling over as we put on their pyjamas. We tucked them into their hammocks, fell into our own and slept for several weeks.

  One morning, we sailed under the bridge Mr Firth had built upstream of the Okauia Springs. There, the river became too rocky for us to go any further. Weeping willows trailed in the water and hid the western bank.

  “Run a rope around those branches,” said Aunt Effie, “and pull them aside.” The trailing branches and green leaves opened like a theatre curtain. We poled the Margery Daw up the creek they had hidden. Peter and Marie let go, and the willows closed behind our stern.

  “We’ve covered our tracks.” Aunt Effie looked back at the green curtain between us and the river. “They’ll never find us now,” she said, and we knew whom she meant.

  That was a cheerful chattering creek, just wide and deep enough to float the Margery Daw. Aunt Effie harnessed us to tow ropes, one team on each bank, and we pulled. When we got tired, she stood on the bowsprit, cracked a bullock whip, and shouted rude words.

  “Tsk! Tsk! Tsk!” said Daisy.

  Crack! the whip went just above her head, and Daisy shut up and towed the Margery Daw on her own a good couple of chains.

  Crack! the bullock whip went again. We didn’t know whether it was the whip or the rude words, but we leaned into our harness and pulled much harder. We loved being bullocks.

  One afternoon, we came to the end of the creek. “There isn’t enough water to turn around and go back down,” said Peter.