By Amelia Bury

Don Taylor's teaching career began with a hiss, but no roar at Auroa School.

"It was a four-teacher school, but we didn't have any kids," he says.

At the end of 1947, Don's last year at Teachers Training College in Epsom, Auckland, a polio epidemic struck New Zealand. With fears that the crippling and contagious disease could spread, schools nationwide were closed until April 1948.

Teachers Training College in Epsom, Auckland

However, schoolwork still had to be done.

Like children all over the country, the Auroa pupils did correspondence lessons at home. "We marked the work sitting in our own classrooms in solitary state."

Despite having no children to teach, Don took great lengths to get to work.

Don was living back at home in Eltham when he was appointed to the south Taranaki school. While today the journey by car would take 30 minutes, it took a lot longer in the late 1940s.

"There was not going to be a car available for me to get to this country place, which I'd never heard of."

Like most people in those days, Don didn't have enough money buy a car, so decided to stay in Auroa all week and travel home for the weekends.

Nine miles, no kids

Eltham neighbour Phil Chinnery, who had a car, travelled to Kaponga for his job. That covered half of Don's trip and he biked the rest.

"So when Phil got to Kaponga in his Morris 8, I got out with my rucksack that my father had kept from the army, collected my bike from the local policeman's car shed, biked to Kapuni, then on to Auroa. That was nine miles." (About 14km).

This downhill cruise on a Monday morning was great in fine weather but the return trip on a Friday afternoon in bad weather was not. Don puts it mildly: "On the days that it was wet and cold it wasn't the most pleasant task."

In Auroa, Don boarded with Mabel (nee Clarice) and Wally Howard. He lived well and also lived it up, going to all the dances run by the pipe band.

"There was always a haggis and one of the blokes used to wear his kilt and recite the Ode to the Haggis before he stuck the dagger into it." While the young teacher did not don a kilt, he learnt about the ramifications of eating a boiled sheep's stomach before dancing face to face with someone.

"After supper time when you'd eaten the haggis everyone had this foul-smelling stuff on their breath as you were dancing."

Star strut

Another highlight of Don's time on the Waimate Plains was visiting the "pictures" on Tuesday nights. These films were well attended by the locals.

"Some came on their bikes and a lot of them walked for up to two miles to get there."

At the time the post-war manpower laws were in place.  This meant men were relocated to jobs in other parts of the country, with East Coast workers filling jobs at south Taranaki dairy factories.

Don remembers some of these characters clearly.

"One of them had a big ten-gallon hat, such as those seen in western movies, and they used to deliberately come late to the pictures. Then they used to walk down the middle so they got their silhouette on screen and it used to block out the film completely. They used to put their hands on their hips and strut down," says Don, unconsciously describing an image of the Tainuia Kid (Billy T James) in Ian Mune's film Came a Hot Friday, set in 1949.

"Life in the country," Don chuckles.

He also found love in this rural realm. "I married Eileen Eliason from Auroa".

Gambling and a gorgeous girl

Eileen and Don met at a Queen Carnival over the crown and anchor board at the Kowhai Club in Auroa. They were raising funds for the building of a memorial hall. "The Kowhai Club was a shed on a farm and we had it set up to play crown and anchor and sell booze and put on hot savs (savaloys) and bread for supper," says Don describing the scene, again strangely reminiscent of the woolshed gambling party in Mune's movie.

"All totally illegal, but provided you were keeping your nose clean and weren't doing anything too much wrong, you didn't have any trouble from the cops. They didn't have any cars to drive out there anyhow."

This young man didn't have much to offer the country girl, except his love. "We didn't have a bean to our bloody name!"

In the third school term of 1952, Don moved home to Eltham where Came a Hot Friday was mostly filmed.

Big town, bigger classes

The second leg of his teaching career began the opposite way from his first. "I had 56 children in my classroom and Roy Hurdle had 64. But no one did any thing about it," Don says.

He explains the reasons for these inflated classes. "Because there had been no teachers trained in the Depression, because so many (returned service) men had pulled out and because there were now just so many children in the school."

He sits forward in his chair and a touch of anger crosses his face as he talks about the feeling of imprisonment caused by those huge classes. "It wasn't a case of setting up a hue and cry. Everyone said, 'Oh, it's not good', but there was no escape from it. That's the way it was, that's the way things were."

The teacher and the children were literally hemmed in between the four walls of each classroom.

"When you had 56 in your room and they were all sitting in these clumsy old wooden desks, there were about 12 inches between the front desk and the blackboard and nine inches out at the sides. The kids had to turn side-on to get to their desks and my teacher's table was out in the corridor."

To top this off, the classrooms didn't have any electric lighting.

There was one lone bulb hanging in the room where the school committee had its monthly meetings, but that was it.

Hard home life

Don remembers that his students were an unsettled bunch, especially some of those with fathers home from World War II.

"I arrived in the third term and they weren't terribly thrilled with the people they'd had before me that year. And some were right little sods and of course many of them were living under quite extreme conditions in their private lives.

"Mum and dad were often sparring and dad was threatening to walk out and drown his sorrows at the pub, a consequence of his overseas experience. Things were pretty sad."

Don and Eileen set up house but still didn't have enough money for everything. For the second time in Eltham, Don felt trapped. "I can remember not being able to pay my bills and we went nowhere, we just bought nappies and what food we needed."

He realised the only way of escaping from this was to become head of a country school, where a low-rental house was provided as part of the package.

So that's exactly what Don did.

Far-out experience

Matiere is located about 15 kilometres out of Ohura towards Taumarunui.

Don takes a deep breath as he says: "That was another experience all on its own."

The Taylors moved into the Matiere School house in 1954, only a year after electricity arrived in the area. "There was a post office, local hall, bank and the Cosy Club – the Cosmopolitan Club.

"I joined (the club) when I was there early because I wanted to be seen to be participating, but I couldn't afford to go down and buy a beer; didn't have enough money for that."

At Matiere School Don had plenty of kids, but he was the only trained teacher. "There was a roll of 64 – it was a two-teacher school." The Taranaki Education Board had difficulty in finding a teacher for the infant room.

And so began Don's battle to find a qualified infant mistress...

Next please...

The first contender was a 16-year-old, sixth former from Stratford High School.

"She was thinking of becoming a teacher and she would like to experience something of teaching."

To compensate for her total lack of experience and training, Don took the majority of the pupils in the school – he had 42 children and she had 16.

The teenager only lasted a term.

Next, a woman arrived from New Plymouth.

The locals rallied round to make her feel welcome in Matiere, taking her to the Saturday rugby match where she got more than her share of attention.

Don describes the scene like a rugby commentator calling a game: "She's standing on the sideline with all the others who are yelling and cheering and it's a terribly wet day and the ball's kicked high in the air and it's coming down on the sideline and the ground is as muddy as can be and all 16 forwards all landed where the ball was coming down, right in the middle of the people who are standing on the sideline.

"There's a huge pile of people and at the very bottom is Joan and she's crying. It turns out she's got a broken leg.

"So she went home."

Then a frustrated Don decided to look no further: "I turned to Eileen and I said, 'You're it my dear, you are it'."

Although Eileen was not a trained teacher, Don believes that she could have been. "She had a tremendous empathy for children and good management skills – she had all the qualities."

However, she was not happy when an inspector arrived on the Matiere School doorstep.

"She took one look at him and said, 'It's all yours! I'm not going to do anything with you watching me!'" Don says.

She promptly turned on her heel and went home to prepare lunch.

Weird and wonderful

By the time the next young woman arrived, the school had added a staffroom.

Don recalls that following afternoon tea one day, the newest teacher was cleaning up. "She was giggling away to herself there; she was just laughing to herself. Nothing had been said or done, she was just having a quiet little laugh. It was rather weird."

That's all Don has to say about that.

Eventually Don's patience was rewarded.

He remembers Elva Orr fondly. "She came from Inglewood, Elva. She was a gorgeous girl and she was a trained teacher."

Paid peanuts

After Matiere, Don returned to Egmont Village School where he attended as a boy during the Depression years.

Egmont Village School

He still had 42 kids in his room and he still didn't have enough money.

"Egmont Village was a lovely place, but I was starting to get to the point where I was fed up with being hard up, this was getting into the '60s and we were still being paid peanuts."

Don believes that this was the time when teachers started to get left behind in the pay area. "And it was the beginning of men leaving teaching because they were so poorly paid, and the only escape, if you stayed in the job, was to get promotion."  Don didn't stay at Egmont Village long, moving to Pihama.

Cash on the coast

Don can still remember his last glance at Egmont Village before he drove away. "I looked over my shoulder and said, 'Why on earth am I leaving Egmont Village?' But we were forced to."

Again the issue of money made Don's decisions for him, "All we lived on then was three dollars a week. I know there's a difference (compared with now) but it was still hard going."

At Pihama, a low-rental schoolhouse once again became home.

"We should have been paid for living in it. It was a terrible old thing."

Then he heard the stories about his predecessors.

"One of the heads of the school many years earlier had gathered seaweed all along the coastline and he used one of the rooms to store the seaweed in.

 "Another one was an aviarist, he was keen on birds and he took all the doors off the kitchen cupboards and put wire netting up to use them as birdcages.

"It was a terrible old place," Don repeats.

The school was not in much better shape.

"In the process of upgrading and extending the school building a trench was dug around it about 6-feet (1.8-metres) deep and we had to walk over duck walks. They had pulled windows out, walls down, there was no heating and it was close to intolerable," Don remembers with a shiver.

The "remodelling" started along with the onset of a cold winter.

"They'd torn windows out, they'd whacked up sheets of corrugated iron, which didn't cover all the area and it was midwinter, and the wind was blowing and it was cold and there was no heating."

Professional concern

On top of this, he had a run-in with the school inspector, Henry Sinclair, who had a professional concern about one of the school's teachers. He said to Don: "You have a lady teacher down there who is wearing a coat while she is teaching. I don't really feel that this is on."

Don's response was swift. "Is that right Henry? Well I'll tell you something that I don't think is quite on and that is having to teach in the conditions that we're teaching in.

"I would suggest that you take yourself back to New Plymouth, get something done about the conditions that we're working in, rather than grizzling about that lady, who is an asthmatic, wearing that coat."

The builders – or lack of them – pushed Don to the limit of his patience. When he learnt that they had flagged the Pihama School revamp for a cushy factory job at Moturoa for the winter, Don was furious.

"I nearly flipped my lid, I nearly blew up – so I did something which I said I would never do... I went to work in Waitara."

That is another story, one covering major changes in education, teaching strategies and the pivotal years of Don's career.