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Winter
was a quiet time for my dad in the 1940s. A run into
Wanganui once a week for general goods: fence posts, a drum of
diesel, kegs of beer for the hotel, a huntaway pup, a galvanized
iron water tank. Occasionally dad drove down to the edge of the
river everyone called "The Wan-gae-hu" and shovelled on a load
of river metal for a farmer’s muddy gateway. And we had an
annual expedition up the Creek Road in “Liza,” our
ubiquitous 1928 Chev one tonner, to get a load of old-man manuka
for firewood. Back home, one of Liza’s rear wheels was jacked up
and a belt ran from it to the bench saw used to cut up the
manuka. Team Transport On Sundays, if Mangamahu was playing an away game of footy, dad loaded a cattle crate onto his streamlined new 5 ton Austin Roadstar, covered the top with a tarpaulin, put hay-bale seats inside and carted the whole rugby team to Otairi sheep station, or to Taihape to play the Cascade Brewery workers. The men in the back were quite happy; only four of five years earlier many of them had travelled all the way across North Africa and up through Italy this way. Most
of the winter days were spent in the lorry shed beside our house
replacing valves and rings in a lorry’s engine, or building a
new sheep crate by bolting together planks of Australian
hardwood. The roads were hilly and winding, and our three 70hp Austin trucks had no power steering or automatic transmissions. As each one only carried five tons, four trips up the valley and four down were needed to carry as much as one modern truck. Wrestling the trucks up and down those corrugated gravel roads was heavy work, and when Beryk Dalcom landed the first Tiger Moth top-dressing plane on the Rush Flat in 1951, the pace picked up even more. In
1952 dad bought a seven-ton forward-control Commer. Riding in
it, dad and I sat on top of the engine and we seemed to swing
out into space on every sharp corner of the River Road. At
haymaking time the men called it “the aircraft carrier” because
its deck was five feet longer than on the older trucks and they
had to drag every bale so much further when stacking it in
Kellick’s hay barn. A Long Day’s Driving Dad was carting bullocks to Imlay one day and got back from his last load at 10pm. As mum took his dinner out of the oven she told him that Dunlops had phoned. They needed one more truck to move a big consignment of sheep to Imlay tomorrow morning from a Land and Survey block at the back of Taupo. Could he help them? “Of course, and it’s school holidays so you can come too John.” Dad ate his dinner - home-killed roast mutton, boiled vegetables from his own garden, steamed pudding, bottled fruit and custard - then went out to the lorry shed, took off the Commer’s cattle crate and put the sheep crate on, manhandled a twelve gallon drum into the crate and filled it with extra petrol for the long trip and was in bed by 11pm. Dad woke me at 1am, cooked us a quick fried potato and egg breakfast, filled mum’s cake tin with mutton sandwiches and we were away in the Commer. I remember meeting Dunlops’ trucks in Wanganui East sometime after 2am and dozed off to sleep again as our convoy wound its way up the dusty gravel roads through the Paraparas, across the Waimarino Plains and over the Desert Road. I woke up again as we turned off State Highway One at Turangi just as dawn was breaking. There was a funny, “thermal springs” kind of smell as we headed for the big hill behind Tokaanu, and the higher we climbed the hill the stronger the smell became, from under our seat. Dad stopped the truck, jumped out, yanked the seat off, unlatched the engine cover and found flames flickering beside the Commer’s fuel pump. I tipped our sandwiches out of mum’s cake tin, filled it with water from the ditch to pour over the fire again and again until all the water was used up but the engine was still burning. I then scraped up the mud from the bottom of the ditch, dad dumped it on the burning fuel pump and the fire was out. We
salvaged the sandwiches and ate one each while sitting in the
sunshine by the roadside, then it was time for action again.
During the war dad had served in a Light Aid Detachment, a sort
of AA roadside rescue to keep wounded army vehicles moving in
wartime. Now his army training came in handy again as he took a
big screwdriver from his tool bag and started checking the cause
of the fire. Running Repairs The high-tension lead to the distributor had been swinging free against the clutch rod. Each time dad had changed gear some insulation had been worn off the lead then it had swung back and shorted against the brass line carrying petrol to the carburetor. Every touch had produced a spark, each time cutting a hole a little bit deeper into the brass until it had reached the petrol. The resulting fire ignited the plastic on the ignition cables and also burnt through the hydraulic brake line. First dad disconnected the fuel pump, and then he put a rubber hose into the twelve-gallon tank in the sheep crate and siphoned petrol straight to the carburettor: gravity feed. Next he cut off some of the insulated wire running to the lights at the rear of the truck. He used lengths of this to replace the burnt out ignition wiring, and for an ignition switch he jammed the bare end of a wire under his seat. He pulled the starter knob and the Commer rumbled into life again. We continued on up the hill to the Land and Survey block near Kuratau. The other trucks were already loaded and the last of the lambs went onto our Commer. And then we headed back down to Turangi. On the way up to Kuratau dad had been double-declutching to slow the truck but now with a full load on board, the big hill down to Little Waihi was going to be a challenge. He went right down to low gear and on the sharp downhill corners used the handbrake. The mechanic at the Turangi garage fitted a new hydraulic brake line and bled the brakes. Now we could safely travel faster than 10mph. By midday we were heading south again. Coming down the Paraparas was fun. Every time we hit a pothole dad’s seat bounced up so that the “ignition switch” wedged under it momentarily came loose and the engine gave an enormous backfire. When we got to Wanganui we unloaded the lambs, spent an hour or two at the auto-electricians and finally arrived home at 6pm. The next day dad went back into town and bought several fire extinguishers.
Pillows
One day I decided to make a model of Beryk Dalcolm’s Cessna so my little brother could topdress our front lawn. Dad had been carting superphosphate across the Wangaehu River to the Mangamahu football field that Beryk had been using as a landing strip for his beautiful new Cessna 180 topdressing plane; it could do four times the work of an old Tiger Moth. I went to get some tools from dad’s lorry shed and as I slid the big wooden door back I was confronted in the gloom by a stark white, hairy bare leg protruding from underneath a tarpaulin covering the tray of the truck in there. There were four other mounds under the tarp as well. I hastily picked up the tools I needed and got out fast. A week earlier, late on Christmas Eve 1935, an ice wall holding the crater lake on Mount Ruapehu had burst and a million tons of mud came rushing down our river. It swept away the Tangiwai railway bridge just as the limited Express was crossing it. The Ka steam locomotive and six carriages went into the torrent at just about the same time that my parents were filling our pillowcases with Christmas presents. We had woken up mum and dad just before seven on Christmas morning to show them what Father Christmas had brought us. Dad turned on his bedside radio to check the overnight score at the test match being played in South Africa and instead he heard the announcement “A passenger train has been swept away in a flood at Sulphur Creek.” He and mum left us to our toys and went across the road to the cliff above the river. Just as they got there they heard a great roaring and a huge wall of mud ten feet high swept into view. All the passengers on the overnight express trains had pillows and when I joined mum and dad a few minutes later I was struck by how many of them were being swept down on the flood. But my dad had noticed that some of the “pillows” were the naked backs of dead passengers, and after going home and ringing six long rings on the Spasm, our valley’s one-wire Ericsson telephone, to alert all thirty families connected to it, he hurried off down river. When the first body was hauled onto the bank later that Christmas morning, an old police constable was sent out from Wanganui to recover it. As he was being shown its location at the bottom of a crumbling papa bluff more searchers came running up to him. “There’s two at the bottom of that other bluff, three more under those cliffs back there”. It was then that he suddenly decided he was needed back in town again and it was mostly left to the young farming men of Mangamahu to do the job by themselves. Many of the farmers at Mangamahu were returned servicemen who had fought their way through North Africa and Italy and had returned to this peaceful valley to rebuild their lives. Waking on Christmas morning to find mutilated corpses strewn all along a forty-kilometre stretch of their river was a huge shock for them. Bods
Every
morning for a month after the event, as more bodies gradually
rose to the surface, each local farmer checked his section of
the river and carried any that he found up to his farm gate and
phoned our house, “Molly, we’ve got two bods here at Ruakiwi.”
Each day dad made a collecting trip up the valley and then
parked his truck in the shed. The
word “bods” was coined by the young men of Mangamahu to refer to
the corpses they found. It hearkened back to their wartime
service and helped them cope with the unprintable horrors they
faced daily as they carried mutilated and decaying bodies up out
of almost inaccessible gorges.Their
wives had to burn a lot of black singlets Over the weeks of those strange, school summer holidays they cared for forty bods in that shed beside our house. My mum and a couple of other ladies would wash the mud and blood off them and tidy them up decently. My mum’s guiding principle was, “what would people think if we sent their sons and daughters back to them looking like that”. Every evening another carrier would come out from Wanganui to take the day’s collection in to town on the back of his truck, where the police saw them for the first time. It seems surreal now; no police, no jet-boats, no helicopters, no reporters, no photos, no hi-viz vests, no cover-alls, no masks, no rubber gloves, no zip-up body bags, no SAR headquarters, no OSH prohibitions – just a huge sense of duty to take decent care of the dead. Dad burnt his tarpaulins afterwards and bought new ones. Two years later he tore down the old wooden lorry shed built in the 1880s for horse-drawn wagons and built a big corrugated iron shed for his new ten-wheelers and their trailers. The top dressing planes were creating four times as much work for dad’s business, although he now needed trucks that also cost four times as much. Nineteen fifty-three marked a turning point in our lives. I went off to high school with death as my companion, while those new aerial top dressing planes completely changed the seasonal country rhythms of dad’s post-war carrying business.
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