Chapter 4 Disasters
By the time we had been hosting farm helpers for a few years we were convinced there must be some sort of secret gypsy sign at our gate as we seemed to have a constant stream of visitors coming to stay. I’m sure a lot of people think we must sit on the verandah all day, nibbling the odd grape and supervising the workers but nothing could be further from the truth. Often having people to stay means a lot more work for us, as we have to explain the job and supervise it constantly when sometimes it would be quicker to do it ourselves.
However there are times when help is gratefully received. One such time happened last year when I was on crutches for a few weeks. Now I must stress here that I am not actually afraid of mice, but when one ran across my kitchen bench, despite the presence of seven well-fed cats, I naturally jumped. As I jumped I twisted and tore my calf muscle and not unlike Justin Marshall, I hopped at top speed on one foot down the hallway to the study. There I collapsed, not across a try line for a glorious try, but at my husband’s feet where he sat at his computer. His sympathy was tinged with exasperation when he realised he was expected to be chief cook and bottle washer for the next few weeks, so when a friendly German couple phoned that night he leapt at the offer of assistance.
I lay on the couch in state surrounded by books and magazines, courtesy of my mother and sister, with the telephone and TV remote close at hand. When Willy and Greta asked what they could do to help I sent them out into the garden with instructions to trim back a forty metre hedge line by about half a metre. By the time I was able to hobble on crutches and get outside to see then I found they had cut everything to a depth of six metres in the entire hedge line. This left a huge bare patch, which was growing weeds even as I watched. With an inward groan I thanked them politely and collapsed back on the couch in despair. Meanwhile, encouraged by my response, Willy and Greta wandered around the garden pruning every tree and shrub they could find with all the flair and finesse of a Sherman tank.
Fortunately trees do grow, particularly in Katikati, and I was able to get the next two farm helpers, two keen English lasses, to lay out weedmat and cover it with bark before planting it out in ferns and other shade loving plants. So now we have a secret shady garden with a meandering pathway leading to an aviary – but it does mean we have to keep trimming the hedge!
We made work for ourselves one wet winter when Marty, a Bavarian boy, came to stay.
As wet day after wet day passed with no farm work able to be done he became rather frustrated and suggested that as his job in Bavaria had been a painter he could paint the inside of the house for us. I leapt at this offer as we had been intending to redecorate the house for a long time and here was the excuse I had been waiting for. A young French couple, Dominic and Marianne, arrived as well and were given the job of painting the doors into the hallway – all sixteen of them – while Marty concentrated on windows and skirting boards. Imagine, if you will, trying to negotiate your way around a house with active children where enthusiastic adults have painted every visible surface in slow drying enamel paint.
As Marty finished the painting in each room David set up the wallpapering table to paper the walls – a job he loathes. I restricted myself to supervising and making helpful suggestions. We found a friendly wallpaper shop in a neighbouring town where the owners patiently offered us books of wallpaper samples, cups of coffee and the phone number of a good divorce lawyer. Eventually we managed to decide on a colour scheme, no mean feat for a large five bedroomed house, and I decided to repaint our old cracked wooden fire surround. Full of confidence and artistic endeavour I began my first attempt at a marbled finish. Two hours later I had finished .By this time everything in the vicinity was covered in streaks of blue and black paint but I was feeling very proud of my efforts. I called to David who took one look at the fire surround, told me it looked terrible, and walked out. I painted it all blue then spent another two hours streaking it and myself with black paint to get a marbled look. Again I called David and his comments this time were even ruder. In a fit of temper I threw the bottle of turpentine at the fireplace then watched in horror as the paint trickled and sheered off in sheets. Shutting the door I abandoned it until the next morning when I opened the door and cautiously peeped inside. I stood in awe as I saw what a great marble effect I had created. David made congratulatory noises telling me he knew I could do it. However I don’t think I’ll try another, as I doubt I could get the same effect twice.
It is important to make sure our farm helpers know the reason they are doing something to avoid mistakes. David instructed one Japanese boy, Takishi, to walk through the kiwifruit blocks and kick out the large dead canes lying on the ground so they could be ground up by the mulching mower. He started this job on a Friday then we gave him the weekend off, as we were busy doing the usual taxi service to sports venues with our children while David refereed soccer games. Takishi borrowed one of the children’s bicycles and rode off down town coming back some hours later with a lot of wire. He informed us he was going to make us a gift. We them only saw him for meals for the next two days as clippers, bamboo poles and wire all disappeared into the cabin, leaving us extremely puzzled. On Monday morning he appeared with a beaming smile and his ‘gift’; a bamboo rake he had made entirely from scratch.
‘This is what we use in Japan’ he proudly informed us. He then proceeded to rake out the canes from under the vines. Unfortunately he raked out the leaves which prevent weed and grass growth, the fertiliser for helping the vines grow and most of the irrigation system as well. We gently explained to a crestfallen Takishi that we actually do posses rakes in New Zealand and that wasn’t the way we wanted the job done. It was no use. He persisted with his rake until we found him another job to do where his enthusiasm would not be such a liability.
We should have been warned of these enthusiastic tendencies by his arrival. He rang to inform us he would travel to Katikati by bus as most of our farm helpers do. When he asked which bus to get I asked him to come on the afternoon bus, as I was busy in the morning that day. When I went down to the bus stop I saw a very forlorn Japanese boy sitting by the bus stop. He had decided to come on the morning bus so he could explore the ‘city’ but found our small country town a bit of a shock. He explored the town for all of an hour then spent the next five hours sitting on the side of the street watching the traffic go past. Needless to say he was extremely happy to be finally collected and driven to the farm.
Another disaster was narrowly averted when we had two gorgeous blonde Dutch girls to stay. Margaret and Freda stripped off into bikinis to paint the decking and painted themselves into a corner where they became increasingly Dutch in their language until David organised planks for them to escape over.
Margaret and Freda were a very decorative addition to the landscape that summer as they painstakingly painted all the exterior windows of the house in their bikinis. David found he had a lot of office work to do the day they were due to paint the study windows!
Getting help in weeding the garden is something I always appreciate although I do have to be careful to explain what weeds are. One enthusiastic Canadian, Tammy, weeded all the alyssum, which I had carefully planted to be in flower for our elder daughter’s wedding. She also decided one of my good ground cover succulents was a weed and meticulously eradicated every last shred of it from the garden. The rubbish pile in the gully is now a flowering picture, or will be until the next bonfire.
One year on my birthday my husband gave me a Frenchman for the day! Jacque had arrived for a week and stayed for four months, becoming part of the family. He was in New Zealand for a year and had found the tourist life beginning to pall. Jacque was from a small country area in France and accustomed to working every day. He saw no reason to change the habits of a lifetime, even though he was on holiday, so he did an enormous lot of work for us. He mainly worked at picking the citrus crop. He was a skilled and experienced tractor driver and was worth his weight in gold. On my birthday he said he
would work for me in the garden for a day so I asked him to dig me a fishpond. We gave him a spade, pointed out a likely spot and left him to it. Two hours later all that could be seen was the top of his head from behind a rampart of soil as he dug a veritable grave in the garden.
David, Jacque and I lined the hole with polythene then drove the truck to the quarry to get some stones. We were issued with hard hats and picked our way around a mountain of quarry stone, placing the slabs we selected onto the truck. Despite David’s complaints that someone (with a hard look at me) was only loading small pieces of rock (well, they were heavy!) we had a good truckload with which we landscaped the sides of the pond. We stocked the pond with fantail goldfish and every morning when we feed them I am reminded of Jacque. Incidentally he is now managing a hotel in France and no doubt having a lot of fun doing it. Perhaps one day we’ll visit him although to be fair we would have to do some work for him and the thought of being a chambermaid in a hotel, albeit a French one, doesn’t appeal.
Sometimes the unexpected happens and the farm helpers enjoy the break from routine as much as we do. Last summer my parents went on holiday secure in the knowledge that their house was protected by a state of the art alarm system. As their house is also on the farm they know that we will wander over to keep an eye on things for them. At this time we had three farm helpers – two shy Scots girls, Suzy and Fiona, and a brash young cockney named Arnold. Unlike his hero, Arnold Schwartzenegger, young Arnold was very small in stature but large in attitude. Our farm was his first experience of country life and he was determined not to be found wanting. David taught him to ride the motorbike and he could be seen proudly roaring up to the house to stop with a skid of metal in front of his giggling friends. Fortunately they hadn’t seen his wobbly attempts to turn corners and the inevitable prang as he failed to make the bend by the avocado trees.
One morning the three of them set out to thin fruit from the mandarin trees beside my parent’s house. As they arrived, two would-be burglars ran away. They had obviously spotted the alarm system and decided to scarper. Arnold leapt onto the motorbike and gave chase. This lasted for a glorious three minutes before the intruders ducked through a line of shelter trees and Arnold tried to do the same only to find, too late, that the motorbike would not fit between the trees. He picked himself up and zoomed back to our house where the police were called and a police dog and handler soon arrived. The police dog ran off hot on the scent until he came in sight of our house where our simple minded but very loyal boxer dog saw this as a threat to his territory and attacked him. The police dog felt honour bound to reply to this indignity and the next few minutes were fairly frantic until the policeman and David managed to separate them.
Suzy, Fiona and Arnold then had the glorious importance of being interviewed and asked for descriptions of the burglars and even as they left us to fly to Australia were hoping to be called back to New Zealand to identify the intruders in a line up. They were, however, disappointed in this but thoroughly enjoyed the whole experience.
This wasn’t the first time that we had surprised burglars on the property. A few years earlier two young men came down our driveway one night and were bailed up by our young Labrador dog, Cody. At this time we also had a very timid Dalmatian named Jet who would bare his teeth and smile ingratiatingly at visitors, thereby terrifying them with the sight of his teeth. This particular night Cody stood his ground as Jet cowered behind the bushes and barked nervously. As soon as he barked he became fearful that someone might chase him so he ran to another bush and barked from there. The two burglars decided we must have a whole pack of dogs surrounding them and turned tail and fled. Unfortunately they went through the electric fence into the donkey paddock where first the donkeys and then the geese attacked them. By the time they reached their car they were no doubt regretting their night’s actions and we went back to bed sound in the knowledge that they were unlikely to come back. Police later that night caught these same two men attempting to burgle a neighbour’s shed. Not only did the neighbour’s alarm go off but the burglars became stuck in the window while attempting to escape. Not a good night for them!
Mishaps do happen from time to time despite all due care. Some things are narrowly prevented such as the time a sweet young thing from Switzerland dumped a load of clothes on top of the heater and went to bed. Fortunately David smelt the smoke and managed to discover the pile of smouldering garments in time to prevent the entire house going up in flames.
One winter’s evening my parents were coming over to do some babysitting for us so we could have a much-needed night out. My father took a short cut through the garden and dived headfirst into the fishpond. As it was pitch black my mother had no idea where he was until a wet hand grasped her ankle, whereon her yells were enough to wake the dead. My father was a bit scraped and bloody but laughed it off through chattering teeth and went home to shower and change. The first thing we did the next morning was to install motion sensitive lights to prevent it happening again.
This was a most exciting event for the children who talked about it for weeks. This incident received almost as much attention as the dead cat that was seen one morning squashed on the road outside the farm. I was worried that the children might have found this a traumatic sight but the reverse was the case as they invited all their friends to come and look and had to be discouraged from selling tickets for the privilege.
Another mishap occurred when we slaughtered a beast for the freezer. As the butcher shot the beast it collapsed on top of David. The young German lad, Max, who was helping us at the time, rushed back to the house to get me and was so upset he lost the little English he had on the way. I drove down to see what was happening but Max had beaten me to it and kept lifting my poor husband to his feet and then watching in bewilderment as David moaned that his leg was broken and passed out. This comedy of errors continued with me managing to get the truck stuck in the mandarin block from where the neighbour kindly managed to extricate it. On arrival at the medical centre the doctor wheeled David into the surgery, accidentally hitting David’s broken leg on the side of the door as they went through. Next the ambulance arrived with two tiny women paramedics who struggled to lift my husband into the van. All ended well but it was not an experience that any of us involved in would like to repeat. The good side of all this was that the meat was the best we have ever tasted.
A Man’s Guide - How to Wallpaper a Room in Ten Easy Steps
You will need;
a. Wallpaper, preferably pre-pasted. Also with no pattern, either diagonal or vertical, for ease of matching. If patterned, simply treat as plain and ignore any seam matches
b. scissors
c. water trough and buckets of water
d. ruler
e. large radio with volume on high (essential)
f. the best three bath towels usually reserved for visiting in-laws
g. continual cups of coffee and muffins (chain wife to stove. She probably won’t like the wallpaper when she sees it on the wall anyway)
h. one child to pass you the wallpaper while you stand on top of the ladder and shout.
What to do;
1. Throw away any instructions that come with the wallpaper, real men don’t need these.
2. Listen to the radio. Hum, whistle and sing along with all the tunes and criticise loudly any music that didn’t originate in the late 60’s or early 70’s.
3. Cut wallpaper and hang on wall. Cover any holes at this point, particularly if they show where a towel rail or other essential has to hang. It is much more fun to create a whole pattern of new holes on the wall later in an attempt to find the stud.
4. Throw any used or wrongly measured paper onto the floor, preferably paste side down.
5. Mop up spilled water with towels then bellow for more.
6. Discover the scissors have been used to cut;
a. The donkey’s hair
b. Barbie’s hair
c. a piece from the middle of a roll of fencin
g wire
7. Discover that the ladder is;
a. too short
b. too big to fit into the house
c. in need of repair
8. Complete hanging the paper. Leave mess for wife to clean up.
9. Assure everyone the wrinkles will go after a few days and if they don’t, well, you can hang a picture over them. Not you personally, you understand. After this the only thing you will consider hanging is the person who next suggests redecorating.
10.Finally – take a well-earned break and go fishing.