Chapter 4

Mrs Blaikie continues to speak:

It may be recalled that mother and her small children had a very dangerous
experience in the great flood  in 1868, when they lived on the banks of the
Taieri River at Outram, close to the police camp that washed down the river.

This decided the family to find a new house out of reach of any floods again, and so
the old accommodation house on the banks of the stream at Harveys flat, belonging
to Mr Briggs, and previously occupied by a Mrs Starbuckle, was leased as a
residence, and not to be used as it had been used previously except in a
tapering off process.

The hope of having escaped all further flooding was a delusion, for there were
two more floods experienced at home but not with dangerous consequences,
only inconvenience.’

Let Fan otherwise known as Mrs McGuckin start the tale:

We had only been in the house a few weeks, when it rained and rained, and
the flax and the rubbish blocked the culvert, and banked up the water so
that it came in the back door, more than a foot deep, and ran out the front door.

This time it was early morning, and as mother knew that the flood could
not do much harm, although was still raining, she told the children to stay
in bed, and sent  Alf to the cupboard in his bare feet for bread, butter etc,
and spread pieces for them to eat in bed.

The bedrooms were a step higher than the kitchen. Mother had dressed
and put on some of the household things on the table, and opened the front
door to let the water out across the road where it got away.

About 10 o’clock she heard the road men talking outside and one of them came splash
splash in the front door, and called out:

“Where are you Mrs Kemthorne? It won't rise much higher as the men are clearing
 the culvert. Is there anything I can do for you?”

She replied:

“If only I had a cup of tea and a fire, it would not to be so bad.”

I’ll fix that”, he said, and went to the woodheap at the back of the rise, and in a few
minutes came in with an armful of wood and some dry sticks. He had to put the big
ones in first to raise the foundation of the fire out of the water. He soon had a good
fire going and the kettle boiling.

She made the tea, and he had a cup too, and they laughed and talked about
floods, and he said it would not occur again, as they had orders to put in a
larger culvert.

So they did, and we children used to go and watch them, and sometimes take
their billy home to boil for them, and some of them would bring us lollies.
It was quite an event when the road men were working near.

On the road to Waipori, where there was a bad turn just past our house, and
they were there for weeks, blasting and widening the road. Then to see the 8
and 10 horse wool wagons swinging around these bends at the trot, with
their wagons  piled high with wool bales.

To see the bullock teams with their screeching brakes. Apparently the brakes
on bullock wagon were on the hub and always did screech more than the
brakes on the horse wagons where the brakes acted on the tires.

One day we were bringing a bundle of straw home for the pigs, and we met a bullock team.
The men laughed, and let the leaders come at us, and we rushed to the fence but we
could not get through fast enough, and they had a mouthful before the driver cracked
his whip and turned them onto the road again. What long horns they had!

What mobs of cattle used to pass the house. We would hear whips cracking
and dogs barking, and men shouting, and we would cry out: “Wild cattle coming!”
and rush for the house. Mother had many anxious times when we children were
at school, and was afraid that we would meet the mobs of cattle in some of the
narrow cuttings on the way home.

She would be looking and looking for us coming along the road, and we
would arrive from a different direction, having heard the cattle coming, and
having come up another gully far from the road.

We went to Sunday School in the day school near the  Taieri Church at
that time. Sunday school was held in the afternoon. One day a mother told
the bigger ones that she wanted them to go a little further along the road,
and tell Mrs Cuthbertson that she wanted her to come and see her soon,
and would let her know. On arrival at the house Mr Cuthbertson
laughed loudly, and we thought he was a funny old man, and did not know
what he was laughing at but in a few weeks she was at our house, and
when we got up one morning, there was a new baby: Henry.

We certainly had heard some noise in the night, but did not realise what
it was all about. Alf had been sent to Joe Cookson's about a mile
away for the nurse.

At this time there were three little girls in the house, myself Nell and
Lilly following on after Charlie, who had been born at the Taieri Police Camp.

When Lilly came, father was heard to say in a tone of disgust:

“Another girl?”

“Yes,”  replied the nurse, “and a fine strong girl too, you ought to be thankful!”

Then they both laughed.

The nurse had no children and had been married for years.

Sometime afterwards, when some of my older brothers were discussing this
question, and told us small girls:

“In China they kill all the baby girls, they said so at school. Chinamen
do not like girls.”

So the girls of our family had the conceit knocked out of us early in life. One of
them wondered as she pondered, and questioned mother about it, and
came to the conclusion that it was better to be a good woman than a bad
man anyway. She never liked Chinamen all her life.

After the flood on the plain, our parents had decided never to live near the
river again, and leased a part of Brigg’s house at Harveys Flat, 2 miles from
Outram on the road to Waipori.

It was an eight room place, built for a public or accommodation house
during the gold rush to Waipori. The traffic went via Lawrence Road through
Milton, so and they had never had much business done in the house.

Mrs Starbuckle was in charge of the place at the time.  We stayed there at
this time about 3 months. Father bought 75 acres near Outram, from Mr Fulton,
on the road to Maungatua.

He built a house on it and had it fenced and there was a piece set aside for a garden.

‘