A hard life but a good life
Louise was Robert and Alice's fifth child - there were to be 11 Willis children: Margaret, Alice, Robert, John, Louise, Lilly, George, Maud, Mary, May and Mabel.
Robert was a tad forgetful. He would register his children's births in Manaia when he was next in town - often months later when he'd forgotten the exact day of birth. He was one day out with Louise's birth date, two week's with Lilly's and three months out with Mary's birth date. Luckily the older girls in the family kept a note of when their siblings were born so celebrated their birthdays on the correct day. He didn't bother to register May's birth, she had Downs Syndrome and a child that "wasn't quite right" was seen as a bit of an embarrassment.
Chores: children were expected to help out on the farm. Image: Puke Ariki N.11.15
The Willis girls were a tough lot - they had to be. They were expected to pull their weight in the family and on the farm. But they had strong maternal instincts too and the older girls were expected to look after the younger children.
Robert had a "very Victorian" attitude toward girls. He believed they weren't worth educating, and "any work they did was for the benefit of the parents until they married." It wasn't a woman's place to own a farm, but a girl was expected to earn her keep by working on the family farm.
After the first five years the Skeet Road farm was able to support the growing family. A vegetable garden, orchard, chooks and pigs as well as a good herd of dairy cows meant the family lived well. Breakfast was porridge and bacon, lunch was often baked potatoes served with butter made on the farm. Bread was made every day from their own yeast by keeping a piece of dough from the day's baking in a jar for the next batch. Bees meant they always had a good supply of honey "it was never strained we had to have that on our bread (bee bits and all)," recalled Louise.
Cheap meat was bought and made into pies, or the boys would catch hares, soak them for a day in water then chop them into pieces. "People say they don't like hare. You milk a dozen cows and come in and you're starving. By golly, you would eat hare or any other thing. In fact you'd eat a horse and chase the rider."
Lighting was by kerosene lamp or tallow candles made in tin moulds. Saturday night was bath night. A galvanised tin bath, just big enough to sit in was placed in front of the fire and filled with water heated over the fire, the water getting dirtier as each child took their turn in the bath. In summer the children went swimming in one of the two creeks on the farm, washed their clothes and didn't need to bathe that night.
School days
Fancy dress: Louise is in the middle back with a beard. Click here for larger image. Image: courtesy of Grace Thrush.
The children walked down the dirt road to Kāpuni School in summer and winter. They wore heavay stiff hobnail boots, and white starched aprons over their dresses. Louise remembered jumping from puddle to puddle on her way to school on the one kilometre walk. The children were lucky to live so close as others had to ride horses which were turned loose in the paddock surrounding the school.
School was taught from 9.30am to 3pm, allowing children who had to help with the morning milking to get ready. Children were taught reading, writing and arithmetic along with drawing, geography and history, with needlework for girls.
Children who had been up early milking cows would often fall asleep in class. One national newspaper of the day called these children "the country's own special white slave traffic". If they fell asleep children would get caned by the teacher.
It was a tough life as a teacher in those days. Often the country schools were sole-charge leaving 30 or more children of different ages to be taught by the one person.
School teachers were paid by contract according to an average of their attendance register. If a child was kept out of school to help on the farm the teachers pay was reduced. "(Our teacher) Mr Laws had begun at Kāpuni School expecting one hundred pounds a year, in fact he was paid only ninety pounds."
Not everyone held teachers in respect according to a tale Louise told. Mr Laws had scolded a boy for eating a sweet. When he was asked to spit it out the boy swallowed the sweet and was given the strap for his cheek. The boy's father came to school and asked why he thrashed his boy. "Because he didn't do as he was told," was the reply. Turning to his son the father said 'well Charlie, you hit him. He hit you, you hit him." Up jumped the boy and set about chasing the teacher around the school trying to hit him.
Milking time
A group of settler children pose in front of a cow shed. Click here for larger image. Image: Puke Ariki N.11.3.
Like many children who lived on a dairy farm Louise and her brothers and sisters were expected to do their fair share of work: feeding animals, hauling water from the well to wash the laundry, chopping wood, looking after younger siblings and milking cows.
The family were running 38 cows on 40 hectares of new farmland, grazing amongst the fallen logs that still covered the ground. At first the cows were milked where they were found in the paddock, a stool and milking bucket carted around after each as they grazed. Fences were few and far between on the farm, so the calves were tied up to keep the cows nearby. Later a lean-to shed was built which protected them from the Taranaki rain.
The children got up at 5am to milk half a dozen cows each by hand, then indoors to tidy up, have breakfast and walk to school. After school they changed then went out to milk the cows again, before home, tea and bed, usually by 8pm. "You were jolly glad to get washed and into bed," said Louise. As she got older Louise was expected to milk 12 cows at a time which would take up to three hours each milking.
After the fire
After the fire in 1890 Robert Willis built two rooms onto the detached kitchen for the family of 10 to live in. It was to be their home for the next five years, parents in one room and children in the other. A curtain divided the children's room and the big bed that sat in the middle - boys on one side, girls on the other.
Nearly penniless, Robert and Alice worked frantically on their farm to recover their lost earnings. By the time she was eight Louise would be expected to pull her own weight in the house, minding babies, cooking dinner and washing nappies.
In 1895 Robert's brother John arrived from Ireland. He took over the Kāpuni farm and the family moved to Rowan "on the other side of Kaponga" to start again on a new farm. The reasoning being that Robert had a big family who could help knock the new farm into shape The new farm was supposed to have a decent house on it. "It was certainly big," Louise recalled. "But it was only two great big rooms. I think of it now, I think to myself, golly, it must have been awful. Yet you didn't know any different… We did think it was awful to have the water coming down on the inside, it was all boarded… when it rained in a certain direction because there was no guttering…"
Water for everything, from a cup of tea to buckets-full for the laundry, was hauled 600m from a well by the girls until 16-year-old Bob dug a well closer to the wash house.
The Rowan farm was not as productive and the Kāpuni farm. Robert and Alice went sharemilking to make extra cash for the family, leaving their family to run the farm. Margaret stayed at home to look after the younger children, Alice, Louise and Lilly; aged 15, eight and seven, were sent out to earn much needed income for the family by working for neighbours "keeping house" or milking cows. The money they earned went toward buying home comforts - linoleum for the cold rough wooden floors and proper blinds for the windows. The children's mother was often ill so the girls were used to running the farm and family by themselves. Louise left school aged 11 so she could help on the farm fulltime.
Playtime
The children rode horses every chance they got , as Louise recalled "there wasn't much else to do." They took milk over to their Uncle William's place on the back of the farm - riding bareback two to a horse - one to hold the billy of milk and the other to control the horse, arguing whose turn it was to hop off and open the Taranaki gates. The children rode well, racing horses and jumping them over fallen logs. They made their own fun, swimming in the crystal clear rivers, playing cards and board games. Younger children would play 'bullrush', make shanghais and stilts and go bird nesting or exploring. Knuckle bones were collected from the skeltons of dead sheep, treasured dolls were made from rags and books were few and far between. Reading the Bible was a family pastime. The Willis children went to Sunday School, Methodists one Sunday and Presbyterians the next.
Taking milk to the local dairy factory was a way of catching up on local gossip and regular chopping competitions, wrestling and running races were an opportunity for the local community to meet. Social card evenings and dances were sometimes held locally.
Handcraft skills were important for the girls - knitting and lacemaking, they sewed all the family clothing and most of the furnishings - at first by hand and then with a little treadle sewing machine the girls had saved up for. Clothing was handed down from child to child, garments were fashioned out of sugar bags and cheap cloth.