Chapter Ten: Tea With the British Cannibals
Chapter Ten: Tea With the British Cannibals
The Reverend's Descendants
So the Māori chief informed Joe The Reverend and his companions that they were welcome to stay the night but would be eaten on the morrow.
Matthews may not have been trained in theology — though they were true believers, none of the first missionaries were trained theologians or prepared for life in New Zealand — but he quickly displayed the quick-thinking which would save his life and stand him in good stead later when he managed to acquire much of the best land in the area, including all the most beautiful beaches in the Far North, acquired those lands for him and those most direct descendants of his who still bore the name Matthews. English primogeniture.
He told the chief that he and his people were welcome to eat him and his companions but not on the morrow because the morrow was the Sabbath. And the Reverend Joseph Matthews preached the first Christian sermon in the Far North of New Zealand, a sermon on the Wonders of the Sabbath, which so impressed the local Māori that they not only spared Joe and his boon companion missionizers from being the main entrée but the local Māori converted to Christianity and then received all the concomitant benefits of western civilization.
Mostly, they received potatoes, turnips, muskets and venereal diseases. And they lost the best land in the neighborhood.
Now, I don’t wish to appear cynical or even skeptical, but a sermon about the Wonders of the Sabbath convinced the local tribes not to eat him but to change their ancient religion for a brand new one? A day of rest one day a week so impressed folk who had a calendar based on seasons and phases of the moon, not a calendar with days and weeks? They lived by the seasons, as do all pre-industrial people. No, the entire episode strikes me as related to the story of George Washington and his Father’s Cherry Tree. It is, after all, a well-respected genre around the world. Creating respect for the Father of one’s Country. Or in this case, creating respect for the Father of most of the little children running around the Far North of New Zealand.
Tea was to be had at the family bach on the beach. Bach is not pronounced as in Johann Sebastian Bach. It is pronounced as “batch.” It means a shack or cottage or a small and very basic holiday home. I remember hearing people back in rural Missouri and Arkansas talk about “batching it” when they meant living in a simple and almost slovenly way.
(Please, no comments in your mind’s commentary about how you thought that was the standard mode of living in the Ozark Mountains — surely having had a President of the United States from Arkansas has put an end to such prejudice. But then. Gennifer Flowers. Paula Jones. Bill. Well, maybe not.)
Anyway, this bach is located down on the Matthew’s beach just outside the nondescript little town of Taipa. Another of the loveliest beaches in the world. Probably a quarter mile long, almost a perfect half-moon bay with soft golden sand, some giant pohutukawa trees that are 500 or 600 years old. These trees would be covered in beautiful large red blossoms if Dee stayed until the height of summer. Summer is December Down Under. Which is why they are referred to as the New Zealand Christmas tree (when everyone gets chrissy pressies—More baby talk).
At one end of this beach are a very basic bach and an even more basic Long Drop. Long Drop in New Zealand refers to an outhouse.
Lest you get the idea that I am some kind of snob from the O.C. making fun of Kiwis by mentioning an outhouse, please allow me to state yet again that I grew up in the wilds of Missouri, far far outside of Poplar Bluff, down towards the Arkansas State Line. When I was little, one of my cousins traveled to Little Rock with his Mum, I mean Mom, to spend a weekend with some of her relatives. That night when he needed to tinkle before now-I-lay-me-down-to-sleep-time, she took him into the toilet.
“Oh, no, I’m not gonna do that in the house!
The only reason I even mention the Long Drop is because of Louis Vuitton. Please stay tuned.
Now Maddy Jane (Maddy Jane Matthews before she got married fifty-some years ago) lives in a house on a rise overlooking the beach with two wonderful cats and two wonderful dogs. The big dog, an Alsatian (known as a German Shepherd in the U.S.) barks fiercely at everyone but only bites assholes. A good dog.
Maddy Jane’s youngest child, Graham, lives in a house about 200 feet away with his wife Pippa and their three school-age daughters and some cats and with the biggest mess you have ever seen in your life outside of an Ozark Mountain poor white trash dump.
I’m talking about the interior of their house.
Outside is the most beautiful view in the world, this beach which can make your heart stop, sparkling pure waters of Doubtless Bay, the luscious landscape of the Far North of New Zealand, and at either end of the crescent Bay there are little rocky headlands that look like miniature volcanoes. Pure New Zealand, just like the magazine tourism advertisements. Inside their house is the “Wreck of the Hesperus, crashed on the Reef of Norman’s Woe.” Just like the Longfellow poem.
Now, Graham is 43 but has never grown up.
First I drove the car up to Graham’s house. As we approached the door, we saw a wooden plaque affixed by a large rusty nail more or less in the center of the door:
Obviously a sign manufactured by Graham Reed himself. What would Freud say? Or Groddeck?
No one was there so we backed up to his mother’s house next door.
“Ma, just so you’re aware. Maddy Jane is only 70 but she moves very slowly. She has a wooden leg.”
“Oh, God, not again. Well, if it falls off, I’m not putting it back on for her. That’s for you or Aaron to do. Did I ever tell you about the time Lulu Bono’s wooden leg fell off in the shop—”
“Ma, please.”
Maddy Jane herself opened the door.
“G’day, Boys. You must be Dee. Welcome to New Zealand. Dee, this is my son, Graham. The rest of the tribe is down the hill at the beach bach. We waited to ride down with you. Your four-wheel drive is just the thing!”
On the way down to the “Tea” party, we came upon a sheep upside down beside the track, all four legs sticking straight up to the blue heavens.
Can’t seem to get away from death and dying these days, I thought, rather grimly.
“Halt the Land Cruiser!” yelled Maddy Jane. She opened the door before I came to a stop, then slowly got out of the car and made her way over to the poor sheep. The rest of us just sat still. After a few seconds, Maddy Jane’s son got out and followed his Mum and stood off to the side and a little behind her.
“What should we do, Beau? Should we get out, too?”
“I told you Boys I’m not putting on any wooden legs today for anybody, thank you, and I’m not pulling any dead sheep off the track.”
“Don’t you think one of us should help them, Beau? You want me to help them, Beau.”
“You want me to help them, Aaron? Do you think I should go help? What are they going to do with the poor thing?”
“Oy vey iz mir! Is she meshugah? She’s kicking the dead sheep with her wooden leg!”
We watched as Maddy Jane, standing solidly on her one good leg, put the shoe of her wooden leg firmly into the thick wool of the sheep’s flank, and then raised her leg slowly as though she were kicking a field goal in slow motion. The sheep rolled over and suddenly leapt to its feet and ran off, bleating furiously.
“Pregnant!” yelled Maddy Jane. “Sometimes they get so fat in late pregnancy that they just roll over on their backs when they try to get up from lying down, just roll right over and can’t move, legs waving in the air until they run out of energy. They’ll die if somebody doesn’t roll ’em over and get ’em going again.”
Beau leapt out of the car and helped Maddy Jane back in.
“Graham!” Maddy Jane yelled out. “Get back in the car.”
Dee had a look of amazement on her face. “That’s incredible. And you only have one leg!”
“That’s nothing,” said Maddy Jane. “My husband only had one eye and he ran this whole farm for fifty years.”
Dee leaned very close to me and said in a whisper that almost deafened me, “I know what her son’s missing.”
A few seconds later we were at the beach. We helped Maddy Jane and Dee out and they took seats side by side at one of the two picnic tables set up under the wide overhang of the bach. Now this bach of Maddy Jane Matthews Reed is the iconic New Zealand bach. Everyone in New Zealand has a dream of owning a bach at or near a beach somewhere along the 9824 miles of the country’s staggeringly beautiful coastline. This particular bach and its setting is so iconic that a major bank of New Zealand sent a film crew of 74 people all the way from Auckland up to the top of the country to film it for use in a television commercial.
A classic New Zealand “bloke” is sitting in a little aluminum fishing boat just off the beach here, with Maddy Jane’s bach in the picture. After several classic scenes of the good, outdoor life in New Zealand, shots of people bungee jumping in the gorges of the South Island, swimming and boating in the Marlborough Sounds, mountain and rock-climbing in the Southern Alps, raising glasses of New Zealand’s famous Chardonnays on the terrace of one of its most beautiful wineries, there is the middle-aged fisherman again, Maddy Jane’s bach in the background, the sea rising and falling gently before this loveliest of beaches. “OI know one thing,” he intones in a very broad, almost incomprehensible Kiwi accent. “One doiy, Oi’m gunna retai-ah roit heeah!”
Well, he didn’t but we did. And here we are. If you walk over that small rise to the west of Maddy Jane’s beach, and walk along the incredible volcanic rock formations and the golden sand, just around to the next Bay, you will find our farm and its own beach, as beautiful as any of the world’s beaches.
Aaron, do you know you have leukemia?
That’s for another day. I pushed it out of my mind again. I would think of that another day.
“Shiver my soul and shiver me timbers, Dee, I’m tired dear! Do you want a bevy* or a tinnie*? I don’t drink me’self but all my kids do so just shout out if you want something and they’ll be Happy as Larry* to get it for ya. Graham my son, you met already. Along with one of the fat girls in the paddocks, she’s probably up their droppin’ a couple o’ wooly lambs right now as we speak, hope that didn’t give you the colly-wobbles*, dear— now, this is my daughter, Stormy, and her partner Graham, makes it confusin’ with a son and a sort-of-son-in-law both named Graham but every other bloke in New Zealand is named Graham or Grant but Bob’s your Uncle* and there ya go! This is my second daughter, Bluebird, and her second husband McMac, he’s a bit of a dag*, a bit dodgy*, you know what I mean so don’t let him brass you off*, just pay him no mind, everything he says is a load of old cods wollop*. He’s as rough as guts*. Thinks he’s a flower pot ’cause he’s got a whole in his bum*.
“Bluebird and McMac live down in Auckland but he wants to retire up here on the farm. Roight! He’s always mooning around the bach or else he’s up the boohai shootin’ pukekos with a long-handled shovel— he’s one o’ those hangers-on.”
“And we are gonna retire up north here,” said McMac, “or my arse is a red cabbage*.”
“Oh, yeh? Roight!! So Dee, I named my first daughter Stormy because the day she was born was no ordinary storm, why we hadn’t seen nothing like that for 150 years, not since the Reverend come out from Old England. And Bluebird I named like that ’cause the minute she was born I looked out the window and saw a bird fly past the window. It was just a magpie but I sure as shivers wasn’t going to name her Magpie so I look at the blue sky and I think, O.K., Bluebird it is. Even though we got no bluebirds in New Zealand.”
“So how’d you choose the name Graham for your son?”
“Oh, he’s the youngest. By that time, we didn’t know what to call another child and as I told you, every other boy in New Zealand is named Graham or Grant so we flipped a Queen’s coin. Heads for Grant, tails for Graham. He got tails.”
“On second thought,” said Dee, “Maybe I need to have a beer.”
That was a good decision because none of us knew what the rest of the evening had in store for us.
END OF CHAPTER NINE
Wait for the next chapter on Substack or buy the whole book on Amazon
IF YOU LIKED THIS, PLEASE GIVE MY HEART A LITTLE TAP AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS POST
Aaron Allbright’s novel in five parts will be published on Substack.
Before too long!
IN A DESERT OR A CITY
BOOK I
‘PRINCE CARTIER’ or HOW I LEARNED TO LOVE BEING GAY WITH MY SAUDI PRINCE AND TO START WORRYING
BOOK II
MONSIEUR LE PRINCE, PARIS
BOOK III
THE MYSTERIES OF PARIS
BOOK IV
TYROMANCY AND LUCIFER
BOOK V
WHY WAIT FOR THE LIGHT?