Tamar Read online

  As the sun rose higher, the Captain ordered the anchor lifted and the Rebecca Jane was towed to Queen’s Wharf, where the immigrants were to disembark. The process was frustratingly slow and several hours passed before they were on solid ground, waiting impatiently for transport to Auckland’s immigration barracks. While they waited, sheltering from the cold drizzle, they amused themselves by staggering about, their sea legs not yet adapted to the sudden lack of rolling motion. Most of the cabin passengers had already departed in hired coaches or had been collected by friends or family. As Tamar and Myrna stood under the inadequate shelter of a sunshade, Tamar spied John Adams striding purposefully towards her, hat in hand.

  ‘Tamar,’ he said, coming to a muddy stop and handing her a folded piece of paper. ‘This is where I’ll be staying,’ he said, pointing at his note. ‘Dr Basil Stokes is a friend of mine, and he’s putting me up. As soon as you are settled, send me a note and I’ll come and see you. Then when I’ve set myself up, you can come and visit me. I’ll have my own rooms by then, and a house. Tamar?’ he added, a pleading note creeping into his voice. He reached out and took her hand. ‘Will you visit me?’

  Myrna quickly turned away and busied herself lighting a cigarette.

  Tamar nodded. ‘As soon as I am settled somewhere permanent, John. I promise. Whatever happens, we’ll always be friends.’

  John gazed at her solemnly, suspecting he was on the verge of losing her. Tamar saw the sadness in his eyes and her heart ached for him. ‘I promise there will always be a place for you in my life.’

  Myrna raised her eyebrows and thought, what are you playing at, lassie? Tamar was passing up an offer most women would kill for. John Adams may not be the most handsome man in the world, but he was possibly the kindest and certainly the most loyal.

  John leaned forward and kissed Tamar very gently on her cheek. ‘I’m going now,’ he said. ‘Please keep in touch.’

  ‘I will,’ she replied as he walked away, ramming his hat aggressively on his damp head.

  ‘Oh, dear, I hope I haven’t upset him.’

  ‘We’ll see, lassie, we’ll see,’ Myrna muttered as she gazed after John.

  The transport, a convoy of carts drawn by bedraggled-looking horses, finally arrived and the immigrants loaded their belongings and climbed in, chattering excitedly and pointing out interesting sights as they drove through the muddy streets. When they arrived at the immigration barracks many were relieved to see the building was better maintained than the barracks at Plymouth. They were asked to show their medical certificates to immigration officials as they filed in through the main entrance, given a perfunctory tour of their temporary accommodation and advised a lecture about their new country would be held in an hour’s time in the dining hall.

  Tamar had little sleep that night, excitement was high and most did not turn in until after midnight. Speculation was rife about employment opportunities and the next morning many of the men rose early, eager to explore the town and begin job hunting. By the end of the day none of those who returned had found work, but most remained positive.

  The new immigrants were only permitted to stay at the barracks for a few days so finding other accommodation was a priority. Tamar, Polly, Jane and Sally decided they would relocate together to a boarding house and one of the immigration officials recommended a respectable establishment on Ponsonby Road. ‘It’s not cheap,’ he warned. ‘Best you find yourselves good jobs before you settle in too comfortably.’

  ‘Oh, we will, Mister, don’t yer worry yer ’ead about us!’ Polly replied optimistically. ‘This ’ere’s the land of opportunity.’

  Myrna and her girls had already left the previous day, Myrna having rented a house in Mt Eden while she went about the task of setting up her business. The farewell had been emotional but the women parted on an optimistic note, Myrna taking Tamar to one side to tell her she could help them if things did not go as well as they hoped.

  As the girls climbed down from the carriage outside the boarding establishment on Ponsonby Road and waited for their luggage to be unloaded, they stared up at the house that would be their home for as long as they could afford it. It was a slightly shabby but still handsome two-storeyed wooden residence with verandahs along the front and a modest portico over the front door. Tamar and her friends looked at each other, eyebrows raised; none of them had ever been in such a big house before, let alone lived in one, but while they had a little money they intended to make the most of it.

  ‘Well,’ said Polly, her hands on her hips, a wide smile on her face and her fluffy blonde hair escaping from under her hat. ‘This is a bit of all right, isn’t it? I wish everyone back ’ome could see me now. Wouldn’t they be green?’

  She walked boldly up to the front door and banged the brass knocker. The girls heard footsteps hurrying up the hall inside, then the door opened halfway and a bespectacled, middle-aged face peered out.

  ‘Yes?’ asked the woman, her foot wedged firmly behind the half-opened door. ‘Can I be of assistance?’

  ‘We understand you’ve rooms fer lease ter single women,’ said Polly brightly. ‘We’re new immigrants an’ we’ve just arrived.’

  The woman held her hand out through the gap in the door. ‘Papers please.’

  The girls handed over their documents and waited while the woman read them slowly and thoroughly.

  ‘Well, then, good morning to you,’ she said when she’d finished, evidently satisfied. ‘Seamstresses and domestics, I see. I am Mrs Barriball. I apologise for my hesitation but one cannot be too careful,’ she said, opening the door wide. She was dressed in a severe black grosgrain gown with a small collar and a white lace cap with black ribbons. ‘Come in, please. Put your things in the hall and take a seat in the parlour,’ she said, indicating a room off the wide hallway to the right. ‘I will be with you shortly.’ She hurried off, her skirts swishing, towards the back of the house.

  Tamar dragged her trunk over the doorstep then led the way into the gloomy front room.

  The parlour was dominated by a large fireplace inlaid with pressed tin and an intricate pattern of blue, green and white enamel tiles surrounded by an ornate wooden mantelpiece. On either side sat two over-stuffed wing chairs piled with cushions, flanked by occasional tables with lace doilies and a collection of china figurines. Vases filled with silk flowers and ostrich feathers were intermingled with framed photographs along the top of the mantelpiece, and on the polished wooden shelves above the fire. On the floor was a worn floral carpet with strategically placed rugs, and the walls were decorated with faded floral wallpaper. Everywhere the girls looked there were ornaments and potted plants. Arranged in front of the fire and facing it were two slightly aged-looking sofas draped with embroidered antimacassars, and behind them several more heavily laden side tables. On the walls hung two ornate mirrors and six or seven framed portraits of unsmiling, dreary-looking people. The curtains were heavy and draped so little sunlight could penetrate the room.

  ‘God,’ said Tamar, perching gingerly on the edge of one of the sofas. ‘I’m glad I don’t have to dust in here.’

  ‘Well, we might yet, if we run out of money,’ said Jane. ‘Be good practice, though, fer domestic service.’ Jane and Sally intended to go into service as soon as they could, while Tamar and Polly, also a seamstress, were looking for sewing positions.

  ‘Now, ladies,’ said Mrs Barriball as she swished back into the room. ‘Sit down, please, while I avail you of the rules. Which,’ she added, looking at them sternly over the top of her small spectacles, ‘I expect to be adhered to. I run a respectable establishment and there is no place for slovenliness, low morals or unladylike behaviour.’

  She seated herself in one of the chairs next to the fire and took a deep breath. ‘First, there will be no gentleman callers. You may have lady friends to visit, whom you may entertain in the parlour, but no gentlemen. There is a strict curfew of nine thirty at night. Second, I expect a high standard of neatness and cleanliness. You will att
end to your own rooms but I will supply you with clean linen on a regular basis. You will do your personal laundry in the laundry at the back of the house. There are chamber pots under your beds, but I would appreciate you availing yourselves of the privy off the laundry whenever possible. Breakfast is at six thirty in the morning and supper at seven thirty in the evening. You will have to provide your own luncheon. No cooking in your rooms, and no alcohol or tobacco.’ Mrs Barriball paused briefly, then continued. ‘You may not be here long as the job market is not what it used to be. I am not out to rob young women of their money, but I charge the going rate for a clean, wholesome, quality establishment, and I doubt any of you has independent means,’ she said not unkindly, glancing at the girls’ worn and plain clothes. ‘But while you are here, I hope you enjoy your stay. Now, do you have any questions?’

  No one did, so Mrs Barriball showed the girls to their individual rooms. Tamar’s was upstairs at the front of the house, overlooking Ponsonby Road. The room was furnished with an iron bedstead, a wardrobe and a mirrored chest of drawers on which sat a large china ewer and bowl, and a straight-backed wooden chair in front of a small writing table, on which a Bible had been conspicuously placed. There was a large rug in the middle of the floor and several paintings on the walls. It was nowhere near as fussily decorated as the parlour, but it was comfortable. Tamar unpacked her belongings, then went to sit quietly on the verandah, her mind contemplating the events of the last few months and what the future might hold.

  The following day the girls rose early, breakfasted, and walked to the end of Ponsonby Road. Mrs Barriball loudly disapproved their lack of chaperone but they politely ignored her. The unpaved road was dotted with puddles and piles of horse dung and before long they were hitching their skirts out of the mud.

  ‘Me boots aren’t going ter last long at this rate,’ complained Sally. ‘An’ I’ve only got the one pair.’

  At the end of Ponsonby Road they spent some of their precious money on a public carriage into the central commercial district around the wharves and lower Queen Street. They wandered about for most of the morning, gazing at the new brick and plaster commercial buildings interspersed with older, less grand wooden shops and premises. Occasionally they passed small groups of Maori sitting or standing in the street dressed in an eclectic range of European clothing. The girls were fascinated and a little unnerved as they had never seen dark-skinned people, especially not with exotically tattooed faces. Tamar noticed some of the women had tattooed chins, whereas the men with tattoos were marked all over their faces. They tried not to stare but their curiosity did not seem to bother the Maori, several of whom waved cheerfully.

  ‘They’re called moko,’ whispered Sally. She pronounced the word to rhyme with cocoa. ‘Mrs Barriball said.’

  ‘What? Them brown people?’ asked Polly.

  ‘No. The patterns on their faces.’

  ‘What do the patterns mean?’ asked Tamar. ‘They’re all different.’

  ‘Dunno. Why don’t yer ask one of ’em?’ suggested Polly.

  ‘No!’ replied Sally hastily. ‘Mrs Barriball said if we seen any of ’em we’re ter stay away. She says they’re not civilised.’

  The girls walked quickly off, glancing nervously behind them, much to the amusement of the Maori.

  By midday the girls had been into almost every shop and marvelled over the fine clothes and goods they expected to be able to afford as soon as they found work. Hungry and with sore feet they frittered away more of their money on lunch at the rather splendid Albert Hotel, smiling graciously at the obviously wealthy women also lunching there, who glared at the girls when they laughed too loudly. Polly did not help matters by ostentatiously demonstrating her version of upper-class ‘airs’.

  After lunch they explored some of the smaller lanes off Queen Street but soon retreated as they encountered evidence of poverty and misery. They had noticed this on Queen Street as well — the stench of raw sewage, people with their hands out or drunk in public — but the pathetic peddlers selling nothing worth buying and the beggars and poorly dressed, underfed children running about in the cold without shoes or coats seemed more sordid and depressing in the smaller, darker alleys.

  ‘Reminds me of ’ome,’ Jane muttered. They were shocked and a little subdued. None of them had expected to see such blatant poverty in New Zealand; it was something they thought had been left thousands of miles behind them.

  A week later, the girls were forced to admit New Zealand was not the land of limitless opportunity enthusiastically described by the emigration agents. Many emigrants had been attracted by cheap assisted passages, part of Julius Vogel’s scheme to bring emigrants to the new colony, but by the time the girls had boarded the Rebecca Jane at Plymouth, the colony was saturated with debt. They had no way of knowing, but they had arrived on the eve of a long and severe economic depression.

  In the following weeks Jane and Sally found employment as domestics and both moved out of Mrs Barriball’s boarding house, but Tamar and Polly were unable to find positions. After three weeks, seriously regretting they had spent so much at Mrs Barriball’s, they were forced to move to a less appealing boarding establishment in lower Shortland Street.

  The narrow, streetfront house, in dire need of paint and repairs, accommodated ten single women and consisted of a series of tiny bedrooms leading off a dingy central hallway smelling of cabbage and boiled mutton. There was a large kitchen cum parlour at the far end of the hall, and a small shared bathroom. The privy was an offensive-smelling long drop across a small back yard where a sad and mangy little dog was kept. The accommodation was basic and the boarders provided and maintained their own linen, but it was almost clean and, more importantly, cheap. Polly missed the grand fireplace in Mrs Barriball’s parlour, the vases with the ostrich feathers and the large comfortable bedrooms. She vowed to Tamar on their first night at Shortland Street that she would own a parlour like that herself one day.

  The boarding house had a first floor where the landlady and her family lived. The tenants rarely saw them as they had their own entrance, the husband coming and going irregularly as he did shift work on the wharf. His wife, a harassed and angry-looking woman in her thirties, managed the boarding house and looked after their five small children. Tamar and Polly spent their days walking the central commercial area, knocking on doors and asking for work. They stood for hours in long queues of unemployed women, only to be told there was none. They were both running out of money, Polly especially, and were beginning to despair. Their path each morning took them past the ever-growing slum of Chancery Street with its cramped and decaying houses with broken windows and filthy back yards, and they wondered how long it would be before they were forced to live in such poverty.

  Tamar knew that if she visited Myrna, her friend would offer to loan her money, if not make an outright gift, but she felt too embarrassed to do this; it was too close to begging, and an admission of failure. It would be even more humiliating to contact John Adams and might encourage him.

  In the last week of July, almost two months after they arrived in Auckland, Tamar and Polly were walking up a wet and windy Queen Street when they saw a man place a notice in the window of the premises of Arthur C. Ellis, Draper. They glanced at each other, then rushed through the door. Inside, the interior was tastefully appointed in polished wood with gleaming brass fittings. An extensive range of fabrics, from the practical to the opulent, was artfully displayed around the walls. At the back was a wide wooden counter with a cash register and several bolts of cloth, and behind it stood the man who placed the notice. He sported muttonchop whiskers and an impressive moustache, and was in his shirt sleeves, wearing a bow tie with a dark grey waistcoat matching his trousers.

  ‘Ladies,’ he said, leaning forward with his hands on the polished counter. ‘And what can I do for you on this not very fine day?’

  ‘You have a notice in your window, sir, advertising employment. We’d like to apply,’ said Tamar in a rush.

>   ‘Yes, I do,’ the man replied genially. ‘But I only have one position. For someone who knows fabrics and has experience cutting patterns. Preferably someone with a recommendation attesting to their skills and character.’

  Polly, who did not have a reference, kept smiling but Tamar saw tears welling in her eyes. In an artificially cheerful voice Polly said, ‘Well, that lets me out, dunnit? I’ll wait outside fer yer, Tamar,’ and turned and quickly left the shop.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said the man. ‘I hate to see a pretty girl disappointed, but times are hard. So, I take it you have a recommendation?’

  Tamar nodded and silently handed him Mrs Tregowan’s reference.

  ‘I’m Arthur C. Ellis,’ said the man as he read. ‘You are Tamar Deane, I gather? And you’ve had cutting experience?’ When she said she had, Mr Ellis continued, ‘We don’t do garment cutting, but you need to know how it’s done so you can measure the correct lengths. And you also need to know about fabrics so you can advise customers on the drape and fall of curtains and the like. Do you think you can do all that, and operate the register? I see you have your letters and numbers. I need a scrupulously honest shop girl. I’ve two other assistants, a woman who does the sewing and a boy who works in the storeroom, but you’d be required to do a bit of sewing when we’re pushed. Oh, and you need to be able to lift the bolts of cloth down onto the counter for cutting.’

  ‘I’m sure I can do all that,’ Tamar replied confidently.

  ‘Your recommendation says you hail from Cornwall,’ Mr Ellis observed.

  ‘I do, sir. From just outside Truro.’

  Mr Ellis raised his eyebrows. ‘I thought so. I came out almost twenty years ago. Bodmin was my home town. It will be a treat to hear another Cornish voice in the shop. The job’s yours, Miss Deane. We’ll start with a six-week trial and if it works out you’ll be taken on as permanent staff. Does that suit?’