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An Absurd Ambition

Autobiographical Writings

Auckland University Press

THE EMPORIUM

I

I never wanted to be an engine-driver or an explorer or an All Black. I had no desire to be a bootmaker like my father or a carpenter like most of my uncles or a farmer like some of my cousins. But even in my school-days I longed to be a writer and in the barren years that followed I went on cherishing the absurd ambition.

It all began, I suppose, where my life did — in the living quarters of my father's shop in Hautapu Street, Taihape. On the afternoon of 17 June 1906, the midwife, Mrs Stewart, is said to have thrown up the bedroom window and called out the news to my father who was chopping wood in the backyard. Unlike other family traditions, this one may be authentic. It was the depths of winter, a kitchen range and two open fires had to be kept going in the house, and, as it was Sunday, my father was not occupied in selling or repairing footwear.

At the time of my birth, the town was less than twelve years old. In September 1894 a group of unemployed workers with their dependants left Christchurch to take up small farms on the route of the future North Island main trunk railway and establish a community at a place first called Collinsville (in honour of the radical Christchurch MP and free-thought lecturer, William Collins) and later Taihape. The scheme was co-operative and vaguely idealistic. Food supplies were held in common and the use of intoxicating liquor was forbidden except for medicinal purposes. The little band had not only aspirations but also pretensions. They called themselves the Canterbury Pilgrims and the advance party, of whom my father was one, became known as the First Four Settlers. After initial birth pangs, which involved the discarding of ideals, the township was established and grew with the approach of the railway. The main trunk line reached Taihape two years before I was born and was completed in 1908. The population was then about 1200. Expectations were that business would expand and the town grow even to the size of such a metropolis as Palmerston North.

Even with the more sedate growth which actually occurred, my father modestly prospered. In fact he might have merited a brief reference in Samuel Smiles's Self-Help, a book he brought with him from the South Island. William James Hall McCormick was an Ulsterman, the second-youngest in a family of seven, born in the market town of Rathfryland where his father was an agent employed to collect the linen made by cottage weavers. Rathfryland has one claim to distinction. A man called Patrick Prunty grew up in the neighbourhood, rose in the world, changed his name to Bronte, and had three daughters who became novelists. I'm not sure whether my father knew of the association, and in any case he spent most of his boyhood in the larger town of Castleblayney. In 1874, at the age of eleven, he sailed for New Zealand with his family, forced to migrate by a depression. They settled in Christchurch and he entered the boot trade. The colony in its turn suffered from a depression, he lost his job, and for a while tramped the country roads looking for work. He was already thirty-one years old when he became one of Taihape's First Four Settlers and at last found his niche. He soon gave up full-time farming to enter into partnership in the town's first store and then, returning to his old occupation, opened a boot shop and repair business. He married; the pair had one child, a daughter, Myra, born on 29 April 1904, and shortly before I was born moved into new premises at the northern end of Hautapu Street.

My mother, Ellen Powrie, also came from Canterbury and was linked, rather tenuously, with the original Pilgrims — that is with the original New Zealand Pilgrims. She used to claim proudly that her parents arrived at Lyttelton 'five years after the First Four Ships'. Before that their history is a mixture of myth and legend. My maternal grandfather is said to have been a Scot, the descendant of an earl. But for all his exalted origins he made his living as a builder. His wife was probably, though not certainly, an Englishwoman and in some unexplained fashion they appear to have met and married in Cape Town. Finding the heat excessive, legend asserts, they moved on to Australia. That country was also too hot, so they left for New Zealand. There, presumably, the climate was just right. Or it may have been that they had exhausted their resources and could voyage no farther. They settled in Christchurch and reared eighteen children of whom my mother, born in 1878, was the last but one. After the death of her parents she kept house for her bachelor brothers, worked as a dress-maker, and met my father when he was on holiday in Christchurch, perhaps looking for a wife. She was fifteen years younger than her suitor and may have hesitated to commit herself finally. Whatever the reasons, she visited Taihape with a friend before she was married in Palmerston North, where one of her sisters was living, in April 1903. My father took his bride to a small slab house, little more than a hut, standing on a remnant of his farm on the hills above the town. After three years there she moved to her new home to await the birth of a second child.

The building in Hautapu Street was a two-storeyed corrugated iron structure containing a couple of shops, each with its living quarters. Counting on the expansion of business once the main trunk line was completed, my father had his own shop made large enough to accommodate one or two assistants and, with a touch of the poetic hyperbole which appealed to him, called it McCormick's Boot Emporium. Customers passed from the street between two display windows to enter the shop proper and the men's department. On the right was the counter with its roll of brown paper at one end and the charging desk at the other. On the left were rows of working boots hung on brass screws and beneath them slippers and galoshes stored in bins which also acted as seats. Through a curtained archway beyond this was the ladies' department with its linoleum-covered floor and huge mirror. There was an office with safe and sloping desk, while a corner, partitioned off by curtains, held the repair bench with its equipment. Scattered about were display stands and most of the walls were lined with pigeon-holes for the storage of cardboard boot boxes. Each room had its own open fireplace, and swing doors at the entrance protected the interior both from summer dust and winter cold. With its highpanelled ceiling, its mirrors and its mats, its cushions and fireplaces, its display stands and potted palms, this was no ordinary shop.

The living quarters, behind and over the Emporium, were planned on the same ample scale, again perhaps with an eye on the future. On the ground floor were the kitchen and dining-room linked by a hall which also led to the shop and the upper storey. Upstairs, at the back of the house, another hall opened into the sitting-room and the bathroom, while a long passage led to four bedrooms. A prominent feature in front of the building, added in my childhood, was a balcony extending over the footpath. The house had two outside entrances, an elaborate front door in the lower hall and a back door in the kitchen. Both gave access to the yard and garden where a couple of smaller buildings stood. First came the generator house, source of acetylene gas for lighting in shop and house, and a cubby-hole known as the sewing-room but used for a variety of purposes. At the bottom of the yard a grove of bamboos flourished; ivy spread over the back of the house until it was removed as a menace to the corrugated iron; my mother grew flowers and from a climber on the washhouse gathered large bunches of a beautiful white rose to give guests and neighbours.

II

This was my birthplace and here I lived until, at the age of thirteen, I went away to school in Wellington. I don't think it any great exaggeration to say that I came to know every square inch of the building and the plot of land behind it. Once I even scrambled through a man-hole to crawl under the floor and find stumps of the trees that once grew on the site. My early childhood was sheltered and, I think, fairly happy, perhaps because it coincided with a peak — or rather plateau — in my father's fortunes. His faith in the Emporium's future had been justified so that from time to time he was able to employ an assistant. One, I dimly remember, repaired footwear in the outside sewing-room. His name was Mr Walker. Another, firmly embedded in family tradition, was a message boy named Phil Cryer who left to join the Post Office and rose to become Director-General. My father continued his less spectacular ascent in the little community he had helped to found. He served a term on the borough council and belonged to the Chamber of Commerce, he was secretary of the Domain Board, he was a director of the local newspaper. Sometimes he took me to meetings held in our dining-room and, perched on his knee, I met other grown-ups — Mr Dave Neagle, the saddler, Father Lacroix, the Catholic priest, Mr Weller, the editor. An indulgent parent, he used to read to my sister Myra and me before we went to sleep. He would also tell us stories about the Old Country and the voyage to Lyttelton and the early days in Taihape. At such times his gruff manly voice would soften to a kind of burr, possibly one trace of his Irish origins — there were not many.

My mother had her own fund of stories: how her grandmother rode to New Brighton in the tram on her ninetieth birthday; how she herself on her first visit to Taihape left the coach to climb 'Gentle Annie'; how at her brother's funeral the band played the Dead March — whereupon she wept. She often wept, poor young woman, from tiredness, from overwork, on account of a slight, on account of a quarrel, because someone died, because someone married. Quite as often, on the other hand, she laughed while she cleaned and polished and baked and sewed. She was far more sociable than my father and loved to entertain. She always peeled an extra potato in case someone called, always kept a bed ready for the unexpected visitor. She had a legion of friends in the town and its surrounding district — Mrs Kearins and Mrs Cryer, her neighbours when she lived on the hill, Mrs Sinclair and Mrs Goodrich, who were both farmers' wives, Mrs Sexton in Carver Street, Mrs Wrightson in Kaka Road, Mrs Little just up the road from us in Hautapu Street — to name only the more intimate. As if friends were not enough, she was constantly writing to her tribe of relations asking them to come for a holiday. Some stopped a week; my father's widowed sister, Auntie Stoupe, stayed on for months and irritated my mother by always poking the fire. She worked long and hard to run the household — hence the exhaustion and the tears. Sometimes, however, especially in my early years, she was helped by a girl who did some housework and looked after us children. One I remember with particular affection was Mary Bartosh. She went with us for walks up town or over the hills or through the bush to the Hautapu River. Her home was in Carver Street and when she visited her mother we played with her brothers and sisters. As a treat she would sometimes take us to her church. She was a Catholic and we were Anglicans — or most of us were. My father attended the Presbyterian church, though he was really a Unitarian.

Long before Mary Bartosh arrived I had begun to explore the world that lay outside my birthplace. There was no need in fact to go far beyond the Emporium to enlarge my knowledge of places and people. Next door stood the other half of our building, a sort of architectural Siamese twin, joined over a passage-way to our half and rented to a succession of tenants. Some have lodged in my memory through various childhood associations. There were the Millers who kept dogs in the backyard where I used to play with the younger girl, Bessie. They were followed, I think, by the Browns, reputedly from South Africa and proprietors of a music shop. Mrs Brown was criticized for being a bad housekeeper — she did nothing but read all day long — and for some reason was blamed when her son Charlie broke his leg. Then there were Mr Shute, his large, kindly wife, and their grown-up family. They kept a dress shop. The Shutes had left Christchurch with my father and so were Pilgrims, but Mr Shute was not one of the First Four Settlers. Another tenant, Mrs Wilkes, though she rented the place for only a short time, made a deep impression. She looked as if she had Maori blood, but some people said she was a gipsy. She was always busy, always cheerful, and had a bath of plum wine brewing in her dining-room. The Strongs lived beside us for years and became our friends. Mr Strong had studied art and then became a painter and paper-hanger. Poor Mrs Strong said she was descended from the Baron von Alsdorf and died young, leaving two girls, Norma and Ava. More sinister figures have a place somewhere early in the sequence. They were two old bachelors who kept a saddlers' shop and were suspected of having started a fire one Christmas Eve to collect the insurance. One of my most vivid recollections is of being woken up by smoke and flames to be carried downstairs in my father's arms.

In the end my range extended far beyond our own building to take in the whole town, but I knew with a special intimacy the section of Hautapu Street that could be observed from our upper storey. There were the stables we passed on the way to the river and, in the same direction, the hall where I saw my first moving picture, Robinson Crusoe, and the clattering works of the Taihape Daily Times. In the other direction, adjoining the Emporium, a shabby little shop was occupied at different times by a Chinese fruiterer and old Mr Langstone, the vet, whose son went into politics. Directly opposite us and second only to the Emporium as a source of childhood memories stood the Gretna Hotel. Its interior was a closed book to me except for tantalizing glimpses of bars and bedrooms. But, gazing from our balcony, I watched the arrival and departure of railway passengers, the coming and going of bar-room patrons, the final exodus at closing time, the beery farewells, the boozy disputes, the occasional fights. From the same look-out the fire brigade station appeared to the left of the Gretna and then a block of shops stretched towards the Bank of Australasia, across the road from the post office.

Also visible from the balcony was most of Huia Street, running from the post office past an open space called the Triangle and behind the Emporium. Here were all the town's churches, except for the Salvation Army Barracks at the bottom of Tui Street, and they hardly counted. Nearest us was the Presbyterian church, which my father belonged to; almost opposite it the Wesleyan; farther down the Catholic; and last of all St Margaret's, where I was christened. The first three were small plain buildings standing just off the footpath, but St Margaret's was different. To reach it you walked down the street, through an elaborate lich-gate, up a long tree-lined avenue, broken at intervals by flights of brick steps. At the top of the last flight came the roomy, verandahed vicarage; next the church with its bell-tower, its turrets, its stained-glass windows, and beside it the steepled Sunday School. This cluster of buildings owed their existence to the first Anglican minister, Mr Clarkson, who planned for the future, as my father had, and like him was something of a poet. I walked the full extent of Huia Street to St Margaret's at least once a week. Far more often, however, I followed a route that took me across the street to Mr Turn-bull's blacksmith's shop and then down. If there was time, I watched big, dark, bearded Mr Turnbull shoeing a horse or his assistant, Mr Fleet, painting a cart. After that I hurried past the Wesleyan Church and the Huia Street Hospital to the two-storeyed house on the corner where Dr Boyd lived. At length I crossed a narrow road to reach my destination, the local school.

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Excerpted from An Absurd Ambition by E. H. McCormick, Dennis McEldowney. Copyright © 1996 Estate of Eric McCormick. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
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