[This blog is a follow on from blog 75. Dead Ducklings, War Canoes, Steel Works and a Leper Settlement: Two Teachers, Worlds Apart (17th November 2013). For the origin of these letters see blog 30. Love, Death and Letters from My Mother's Hut (4th February 2012). The letters here were written around the end of 1972 and the beginning of 1973. The protocol followed in editing these letters is as before: mine are in the present typeface (Times) and Elizabeth's in Courier. Any present glossary on the events reported, or reflection on the memories that they trigger, is in italics.]
Wellington, 8th November 1972
Time goes so quickly it is difficult to know what has happened since we last wrote. Towards the end of October there was a Bank Holiday weekend [for Labour Day] so we had an extra opportunity to explore some of the surrounding countryside... On the Saturday we went to one of the beaches on the Tasman Sea, west of Auckland. It was a beautiful day and to get there we drove through part of what is called the Scenic Drive in the Waitakere Hills near Auckland. Very lovely and a very spectacular beach - it was black! The whole of the West coast is ironsand; some of it is used in the steelworks here and much of it is shipped to Japan for conversion into steel.
The following weekend we went to the zoo in Auckland and had a picnic lunch there. The main attraction was the Kiwis. These are nocturnal birds so the Kiwi house is almost completely dark with just enough light to see the Kiwis scuffing around in the undergrowth. The children thought it great fun. Then this last weekend was Guy Fawkes and we went to a Fireworks Display at Mairangi Bay about three miles from where we are staying. The fireworks were marvellous but they did not start until 8.15 by which time Lewis had gone to sleep. From 7 o'clock there were a number of different entertainments including lots of Scottish dancing and a lone bagpiper!
We have begun to look around for suitable housing although we don't expect to move until late January or early February. We are hoping to find something suitable in either Campbell's Bay - which is where Stuart and Sacha go to school at present - or in Rothesay Bay which is a little further out (about 12 miles from the centre of Auckland). We are also making enquiries to see whether it would be better for us to buy a small plot of land and have our own house built on it - this has always been the practice in New Zealand and the Government encourages people to build their own homes by providing relatively cheap finance...
Did I tell you that our car arrived a couple of weeks ago. The children were very pleased to see it. Stuart and Sacha seem quite settled at school but Lewis in particular misses his friends from Carpenders Park. We won't be able to get him into a playgroup until after the Summer holidays.
I am in Wellington this week visiting various people at the University here and in the Department of Labour. Wellington is noted for being very windy (it is wet as well at present) and coming in by plane is very bumpy. Next time perhaps I'll come by train!
Love from us all, John.
Vining Centre, Akure, November 13th 1972.
... On Sunday I went with Joe and Brenda Batt to the War Memorial Remembrance Day service in Ibadan. Gen. Gowon read the lesson. He was in Ibadan with President Senghor of Senegal who is on a state visit to Nigeria. Everything was done with great pomp and ceremony.... the Nigerian version of the Cenotaph ceremonies. They had the 'lot' - Last Post Reveille, Guns salute, march past (or round the clock tower) brass band, red carpet, laying of wreaths and an enormous grey Rolls Royce in which the 2 heads of state sat up at the back and waved to the crowds. The only snag was that although all of us in the enclosure stood solemnly for 2 minutes silence - all the folk behind the barriers in the streets around hadn't got the message so there was by no means 'silence'.
Milford, 20th November 1972
.... I had quite an eventful and very useful week in Wellington. It started with a very bumpy approach to Wellington airport in the high winds common in the Cook Strait* and ended with a bomb scare on the plane returning home! We were all got off the plane very quickly and then the plane was towed away to the far end of the runway by the sea. After we had all had our baggage searched we reboarded and arrived in Auckland one and a half hours late but safely. I also managed to lose my cheque book in Wellington but, although it has not turned up, no one has tried to use it so I have not lost any money as a result of my carelessness.
[*My first experience of flying into Wellington and one of many sick-making approaches and landings over the years. I had to fly into Wellington numerous times on university business, for monthly meetings of the Association of University Teachers executive when I was Vice-President and as a member of government working groups. I was rarely relaxed about it and work offers in Wellington had no appeal whatsoever as a consequence. I can only recall one flight worse than a Wellington one when the plane from Singapore was caught up in the jet stream; even the cabin crew were suffering and a number of passengers needed wheelchairs to disembark . My last flights to date, and probably my last flights ever, were to and from Wellington with Sharon to see the World of Wearable Art Awards Show in 2011. I hired oxygen to use during the flights but that was before I was on oxygen 24 hours a day.]
Vining Centre, December 1972 - letter to friends at Christmas
One is not likely to miss the Christmas message of the miracle of "new birth" here at the Vining Centre. On Thursday last week I was wakened just after midnight with the information "Mrs Ibitoye is preparing to put to bed". So I took her in the Vauxwagen to the hospital. She was obviously in the very last stages of labour and was very fortunate not to have her baby in my car. When we reached the hospital she got out and ran to the delivery room shouting out "O ti de o!" "O ti de o!" (It's coming! It's coming!) The door closed, and about 2 minutes later we heard the cry of the new-born child.
On Saturday morning the mother and baby were discharged, both fit and well. There are not enough beds in the Maternity ward in our Akure hospital for the mothers to stay more than one night after a normal delivery. Anyway no-one wants to stay for more than one night because it costs 2/6 a night and 3/- for food each day. Here in Nigeria everything is much closer to the "no room at the inn" situation.
We had a second delivery this week on Monday. This time it was Mrs Eyitemi, our most illiterate wife, who comes from the Mid West State. She is a poor, skinny and sickly looking woman with big round eyes in a drawn face. She gave birth to twins, a boy of 4 lbs 10 ozs and a girl of 2 lbs 4 ozs. I have never seen such a wizened wee thing as this second minute infant. She only lived for 30 hours. The nurse said that they were slightly premature but that the main trouble was malnutrition during the pregnancy. On Wednesday I went to collect first the tiny body for burial and then later the mother and the surviving baby boy, who although less than 5 lbs in weight was discharged from the hospital on the second day of his life. Now we are busy caring for the mother and the child here on the compound. My contribution at the moment is simply a glass of milk a day. This couple do not have enough money even to afford that! The £1/13/6p which was the hospital bill had to be loaned to the father until he has started work as a Catechist.
I shall not be spending Christmas in Akure this year, for I am going "down the creeks". I, together with 3 other friends, am going to stay with Maureen Olphin who is with C.M.S.[Church Missionary Society] and is the Vice-Principal of the Southern Ijaw Secondary School in Oporoma. This is right down in the delta of the River Niger. Most of the year you have to travel for 2 days in a boat to get there, but now in the dry season you can get to Yenagoa by road and then take a boat for the last 25 miles. It is a very underdeveloped part of Nigeria where life is very slow and most people live with just the basic necessities. I will write and let you know how we celebrate Christmas there.
With my very best wishes,
Elizabeth.
68b Seaview Road, Milford, Friday 8th December
... The last two weeks have been very hectic and trying as we have been looking for a house to buy. All our furniture and things arrived about 3 or 4 weeks ago and have been sitting in store in Auckland. Now we have found a house - address is on the back - and we should be moved in by next Friday December 15th. We are not able to complete the purchase since our house in England is not finally sold but we have an agreement that allows us to rent the house up until the end of April 1973 should that be necessary and as soon as we can complete the sale of 17 Lower Tail we can buy 57 Sunnybrae Rd. The house is just over 2 years old and has plenty of accommodation - lounge, dining-room, kitchen, laundry room, four bedrooms and a children's playroom (called a 'rumpus' room) so as soon as you are ready for a visit we can now put you up! The house is not near a beach, the nearest beaches at Milford and Takapuna being about 2 or 3 miles away, but it has very good access to a lot of other facilities. It is opposite the primary school and within walking distance are some local shops, a large park, Takapuna cricket club, the municipal golf course, tennis courts and a new YMCA recreation centre that includes a gymnasium for badminton etc and a swimming pool! The house is also less than a mile away from the motorway which means I can drive into the University in about 12 minutes. It has a nice level garden of 1/3rd of an acre. It will cost us less than £1000 more than we will get for the house at Lower Tail - $34,500 which is about £17,250. We are very pleased to have somewhere to settle into by Christmas and will move in the day the children finish school at Campbell's Bay for the eight week summer holiday. The Sunnybrae primary school is supposedly one of the best on the North Shore and that was a major factor helping us to make up our minds. We have some photographs given us by the Estate Agents. Pat has sent these to her mother and father asking them to forward them to you as quickly as possible. I am sorry this is all about the house but will write again shortly with other news. We still have not got used to the idea that it will be Christmas in less than three weeks. Temperatures here have been around 65 to 70 degrees for some time with pleasant winds keeping it reasonably cool.
Love to all, John, Pat, Stuart, Sacha and Lewis.
Boxing Day, Oporoma
Dear Ma and Daddy,
I am afraid you will have to wait sometime before you get this letter. Communication, either for people or for letters in and out of Oporoma is pretty slow, and unreliable, especially over the holiday.
...On Wednesday morning we had a terrible time because there was no petrol in Benin. Eventually we found one place with a queue of cars and an even longer queue of fighting pushing youths with cars to be filled. We bought a gallon can - and Ann waited in that queue while I scouted round elsewhere and discovered an Esso station where petrol had just arrived. There was chaos and constant arguments as to who should be served first - the car owners or the can queue. After 3 hours standing in the sun they served me with a full tank and a four gallon spare can - but I have never known such confusion. At times 2 men would get hold of the petrol pipe and be pulling it in opposite directions. One man got squirted all down his shirt front and the owner of the garage kept shouting - "turn off the supply"..... which they did every now and then to let the pushing, shoving, shouting mob calm down. Even when a couple of policemen turned up and there could have been some order enforced we were disappointed because they joined the pushers and got their cans filled by jumping the queue!!
We proceeded by an improved (since 1970) but still 'bad in patches' road to Onitsha.
[We were given] such depressing reports of the road to Yenagoa* that we didn't trouble to make an early start on Thurs. morning because we thought that there would be no chance of getting the boat by 1pm. In fact this was not so - the road had improved... and we reached Yenagoa in 5 hours from Onitsha... so we stayed the night in the secondary school dormitory in Yenagoa. We were very kindly looked after by the Vice Principal there who laid on rice and fish stew, and water to wash in etc.
[The thing I remember most about that evening is that we asked the Vice Principal the location of the toilet and he showed us the hut where it was. So I went there later and opened the wooden door latch and went in to be welcomed by the Vice Principal sitting on a 'throne' made of mud built about 4 feet off the floor and he said 'Come in' and pointed to a smaller 'throne' nearer the floor on his left! I made a quick exit!!]
... we didn't get to Oporoma till Friday. The school boat came for us so we didn't have to wait for public transport... but nevertheless the waiting, first for the boat, then for the clerk to go to the Treasury and then the chug-chug journey (3 and a 1/2 hours) through the creeks and rivers occupied the whole day. We got here about 4pm. There are 6 of us - Ruth Howard, Jill Metcalf, Ann, Maureen, myself and Kay Williamson who is from Ibadan University. She is a linguist and has been studying the languages of the 'Rivers' area and writing reading books for primary schools. She is going off tomorrow to launch a new reading book in Northern Ijaw.
[The Ijaw languages have different dialects creek by creek or area by area so Kay was trying to get primary school story books published so that children could read them in their own brand of Ijaw.]
We spent Christmas Eve going through the 'town' with a group of young people from the Church who did a simple Nativity play with carols interspersed. It was quite a short effort but we repeated it 7 times in all the 7 'quarters' of the town. I should think that we carried most of the children with us so they saw it 7 times over. It went on from around 7pm. till 10.30 so by then we were feeling pretty hoarse and tired. It's a pity that I didn't have any flash for the camera to take a picture of the rows of wide-eyed brown bodied children, and the church agent sitting beside an Aladdin lamp at a table with a tray on it - to collect the people's donations. This matter rather made a 'disturbance' because the people had decided to have a competitive collection - so if £2/10/- was given in the first quarter then the next wanted to 'top' it. The last quarter 'won' with £11 or so. So the Catechist and Church Agent were quite pleased because they can then take their arrears in salary.
...[we]made our Christmas dinner by candlelight in the evening. We had chicken, sausage and stuffing, peas, new potatoes and mushrooms in sauce, followed by Christmas pudding and brandy butter!! Very English - and very nice too.
Boxing day morning was spent doing a puzzle and reading books. Really it has been a delightfully lazy time. It's just a pity that the humidity being almost 100% here - you don't feel like doing anything else apart from sit, or sleep, or eat or 'stroll'. Also Ruth and Jill both got some tummy bug - possibly from the Yenagoa fish stew - and so they were not able to enjoy the goodies at first.
[*Yenagoa is now the capital of Bayelsa State and President Goodluck Jonathan was the Governor of that state before he became the Vice President and then the current President of Nigeria. Fishing and farming in the Delta is severely affected by oil pollution from Shell Company operations.]
| Oil spills have ruined mangrove swamps and polluted community water pumps (photo: Friends of the Earth). |
57 Sunnybrae Road, Takapuna, 27th December 1972
Dear All,
Thank you for all the Christmas presents. The toys are all a great success, Lewis just being able to manage to flip the tiddlywinks and Stuart and Sacha and the rest of us having great fun with 'Misfits' and the Drive game. I have nearly finished the Gerry Durrell book and we are anticipating some Cordon Bleu cookery from Pat. Ruth's presents also went down very well - the Oxfam Happy Families is a good variant on an old theme and my new penknife has already come in very handy. The tea towel is gracing the top of our washing m/c and, as you will see, Sacha has been making good use of the airmail letters.
We have had a very hectic time for the last three weeks and scarcely got ourselves organised in time for Christmas. Firstly there was a lot of toing and froing on the house, complicated by the fact that (a) the house was empty, (b) we wanted to rent it prior to buying it, (c) the owner was in Tauranga about 200 miles away, (d) his employer, an Insurance Co. had some financial interest in the property, and (e) solicitors on both sides just succeeded in confusing the issue and raising new problems. Eventually, however, we got agreement to rent from December 15th and had all our goods delivered from the docks where they had been in store. Unfortunately the shipping company were a bit of a dead loss - quite a lot of the furniture was damaged, there were a number of breakages of picture frames, lampshades etc and some items were missing so we now have to prepare a detailed inventory for the insurance claim - we wondered why insurance cost us 126 pounds but now we know!
Thank you for your Christmas circular letter with all the news and for Dad's letter. New Zealand has all the religious denominations that there are in England and in addition a number of American imports including the people who call themselves Jesus Freaks. Auckland has also got a permanent group of the Hari Krishna set who are much in evidence in Queen Street, the main street, walking up and down and chanting and singing. The Maoris also have a variety of religious groups many of them being adaptations of Christianity.
Christmas is very different here mainly of course because it is the middle of the Summer. The schools have broken up for the summer holidays and industry and commerce is virtually at a standstill until January 15th. As a result most people either go away over Christmas or are getting ready for their holidays. If you can imagine Christmas Day coinciding with the August Bank Holiday you will get some idea of what it is like. There is nothing like the traditional English pantomime although Pat did take the children, together with Andy and Julie their friends from Campbell's Bay School, to the Bugs Bunny Show, an American children's entertainment which they seemed to enjoy. On Christmas Eve we went out to the hills and went for a walk in the Bush - very beautiful and nobody about.
Stuart and Sacha had colds the last few days. Sacha is better now but Stuart has got an earache so is going to see the doctor later this morning. One of the staff from the University, who is also new here, is coming over later in the day. She is from Nottingham and is Lecturer in Social Studies and Social Welfare Work particularly probation work.
Love from us all,
Pat, John and the children.
Oporoma, 27th Dec
Ann and I are still here... The boat was not big enough to contain us all and our loads so we are waiting until tomorrow. We hope to manage to get to Onitsha in the day, and then back to Akure on Friday.
We are becoming decimal here as from Jan 3rd. So in future we shall be working in Naira and Kobo. The one Naira will be 10/-[10 shillings] in value. Then there are to be 100 Kobo to the Naira... so it is not so difficult as New P[penny] because 1/- = 10 Kobo.
I expect that there will be a certain amount of confusion - but not so much as in the secondary schools where the Principals are playing "all change"... both Janet Olowoyo and Mrs Ariyo have been told that they have to go and teach in Primary Schools because they are not graduates. It is madness really - because they are the pillars of the school and they will both be impossible to replace especially as they are teaching Yoruba, B.K.[Bible Knowledge; no, John, not Book Keeping!] and Needlework up to School Cert level - and they are not likely to produce graduates for any of these subjects.
I am glad I am not in the schools at the moment. They are tending very much to run them like a Civil Service - which in this country means to agree to transfer your job at a moment's notice without any thought that you might have an opinion on the matter and that if you are transferred it will affect your wife and family.
We have got silver stars up at all the doorways here. Like the ones I made with Stuart and Sacha last year. I wonder how they are all getting on in New Zealand.
With love
Elizabeth.
28th Dec.
Just received your letter of Dec. 18th - I expect it got caught up with the Christmas mail and delayed a little.
We have also just finished up the delicious shortbread - reminders of Scotland.
N.Z. is certainly pretty sports mad especially about rugby. There is great gloom when the All Blacks lose. We did not see the NZ v Scotland match. We have no T.V. here nor did we have one at Seaview Rd - frankly we haven't missed it. We saw some telly when we were staying at the Motel and it seemed mostly repeats of programmes we had already seen in England, and there is only one channel at present. The All Black Tests are being shown live direct from Britain but that means of course that they start about 2.30am or 3am and even if we had a set I am not sure we would get up in the middle of the night to watch rugby! Many NZealanders do, however, and often precede the tele with a barbeque in their gardens - home barbeques are quite the thing here as I believe they are in the United States.
We have found people friendly. For example, we sat next to a NZlander on the plane from Los Angeles. He was a man of 60+ who lived in Castor Bay; he introduced us to his daughter and son-in-law and their family and suggested the name of a good estate agent etc. We have also kept in touch with the Professor of Law from Auckland (George Hinde) who interviewed me in London and he has been very helpful in telling us about the system of house purchase etc.
Christmas weather has been cooler and showery. Apparently Jan/Feb/Mch are the hottest months with it getting quite humid at times in Feb and Mch.
Love.
Please send photo on to the Sweetings.
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