By Rhonda Bartle

New books and old: Owen Henry at home. Image Puke Ariki TS2007_1184.

In the olden days

Owen Henry, who shares at least part of his name with another famous author, O. Henry, was fortunate. Growing up during a time of no television, no radio and no money, meant many nights were spent at his father's knee, being read to from a collection of loved and timeless books, many of which had travelled to New Zealand on board a ship from Scotland in the luggage of his settler forebears.

"My father would read to us a lot," Owen, who now lives in New Plymouth, says. "We had a copy of Paul Bunyon's Pilgrim's Progress, which he read from cover to cover, a full set of Shakespeare and another one of Charles Dickens. We had Hurlbut's Stories of the Bible. The Scottish people were great on reading and education."

The books may have been dog-eared, but it wasn't through mistreatment, but the result of the sheer number of times they'd been read. "They were very, very well read. One of my uncles could recite an entire chapter of Dickens."

There's an old poem that goes:

You may have tangible wealth untold
Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold
Richer than I you can never be - I had a mother who read to me

But in some ways, Owen was more fortunate than just having a parent who read to him, because when his father, Francis Henry, grew tired of reading what others wrote, he recounted old family stories of his own.

Working backwards

Owen's own story begins in 1923, the year he was born, but he's happy to fill in family background, starting further back.

"Grandfather James Henry came out here somewhere around the 1860s, during the Land Wars. First he went to Thames to seek

gold, then he settled on some land in Huntly. He set up the first Post Office there."

Huntly, in those days, was called Rahui Pokeke, but everyone stumbled over the name. It was James Henry who was asked by postal authorities to come up with another name. He immediately chose Huntly, the name of his home town in Aberdeenshire.

In 1881, James bought a block of land on Duthie Road, Matapū, and moved his family there the following year. "The section was all standing bush. The bush on the roadway was felled but it wasn't stumped," Owen says.

"They went up there and cut a hole in the bush, took the timber up by bullock dray through the stumps and built a house."

Tough times

Owen remembers the old farmhouse well. He spent much time there as a child, while his grandmother was still alive, and his father's stories were often about the farm - about how they grew cocksfoot grass for the cows, how they skimmed the cream into big metal pans that waited in the 'dairy'.

About collecting the edible fungus for Taranaki's most industrious Chinese immigrant, Eltham's Chew Chong, who quickly became the saviour of many a struggling farmer by offering them a sound market for a crop found free on dead trees in the felled bush.

The fungus, known by a variety of names - Woodear, Jew's Ear, Edible Jelly Fungus, Egmont Gold, Taranaki Wool and Black Gold, was sent to Dunedin en route to traditional Chinese buyers in California, Australia and China, who knew it as Muk'u.

My Father Told Me This contains a colourful account of the Henry offspring, riding through the bush on farm horse in the wake of James Henry, and hauling the filled bags home.

But life on the newly broken farm was often hard going for a family with 11 children. "My father used to say, 'I don't know how my mother ever fed us, because there was no money', but they lived somehow or other," Owen says.

"As far as possible, you lived off the land. They planted a garden and ate potatoes, rhubarb and gooseberries ad infinitum. And then there were plums."

Supplies that couldn't be grown were obtained through barter. Only flour, oatmeal and sugar came from the merchant store.

The Henry Family in 1895: Image supplied.

An accidental farmer

It was pretty much by accident - or perhaps more by his father's design - that Owen Henry would turn to farming and one day be destined to take over the land on Duthie Road.

"I didn't really want to be a farmer," he says with a wry smile. "But my father said I was gong to be a farmer and that was that. I came home to the farm in 1940, at 16, and the war had just started.

"I wanted to go down to Wellington and build planes, that's what I wanted to do. After 20 years of sheep farming the bottom had fallen out of wool and meat wasn't much better, so I set up in dairy.

"I didn't really want to be a dairy farmer, either," he says, and again there's that wry lift of the lips. "But there was no choice. I eventually employed a 50/50 share milker, which wasn't very satisfactory, and I sold the farm very reluctantly.

"It had been in the family 116 years. I was getting older and doing all the maintenance while the share milker milked the cows, and I decided I wasn't going to drop dead on there. I drove out the gate in 1997, on the same date my father had died in 1963, at the age of 86."

The Henry house at Duthie Road: Image supllied.

Fingerless typing

Over the years, Owen Henry often told himself that he'd one day write his father's stories down. He would put them into a book so they could be saved for posterity and shared with future generations. In the end, it took a terrible accident to see him begin.

"I did a foolish thing," he says. "I was working in the shed and this bit of wood tipped up under the buzzer and I paid the penalty. Lost four fingertips. That was December, 1984. I remember the date exactly. I virtually chopped them off at the end knuckle."

As a result of a botched patch-up job, three of his fingers required further surgery, lengthening the time spent convalescing.

As a full-time, practical, farming man, Owen found the injury hard to cope with.

"I was laid up. My fingers were very tender for a long time. I wore cotton work gloves to protect them but if I even bumped them…

In the end he found a solution to how to fill his time. "I couldn't do the physical things I usually did, so I decided to do one of those things I was 'gonna' do. I started the book. I bought an electric typewriter with a very light tough, and I could manage it all right."

An unassuming blue-covered book

Slowly, memory by memory, his stock of stories grew. Owen added his family tree and thumbnail sketches of his father's siblings. The result? My Father Told Me This is a slim, unassuming, look at history through anecdotes.

It's one of those rare things that can make history come alive for the reader because it fills in the more personal details of days in remote places, large families and the deprivations and the joy of early farming.

The cover bears a pencil drawing by Taranaki artist Marianne Muggeridge, of an elderly man in an old, high-backed cane chair with a child at his feet.

It was Owen who posed for it, along with his own grandson on the floor, but it's his father's face Marianne sketched upon his shoulders. It was Owen's idea to preserve his father's likeness, "but I think it worked out well." He still has his father's chair.

In 1985, when the book was printed, he used a simple dedication: Dedicated to my father Francis James Henry, 1877-1963, who told me most of the things in this book.

Though it was produced entirely for the Henry family, a copy of My Father Told Me This, has since found itself in the Taranaki Resource Centre at Puke Ariki, where it's available for anyone to read.

He is still astounded by the knowledge his father passed on. "We often used to say, 'Tell us some more stories about when you were young and went to school'. We enjoyed hearing them and I had often thought I should record them or they would be lost. I have been quite surprised when I wrote them down, how many he really told us."

When asked if he shouldn't put his own life story down next, Owen stops to consider the idea, and agrees. "Yes, I suppose I should."