Lucky and me. 1960
I did have my own 12 hand pony at the appropriate time. Lucky was a lease for two years before I went off to school, thanks to Dad and Aunty Pris encouraging Nana to buy me a second-hand saddle. We had such fun. Lucky and I.
Hayley's comet 1912
David Robinson with Seth Tiffen. c1984
A curious fact is dad placed a piece of rock by the home water tank. It had had been picked up nearby. We kids were advised that this was a fragment of a meteorite.
Dad spoke with gratitude that, whilst he was three, his grandad Fred took him on his shoulders outside in the early morning to watching Haley's Comet go by. This was his biggest memory of Fred that he had. Such was a symbiosis- a rub off for Seth, he being his grandson. Dad found the cosmic world out there incredulous. Also, Dad told me he hated his father, so there was the alternative.
Dad kept to few words. He drove safely, dressed for each occasion. Cut his toast in eighths with a knife for his honey on top.
He showed me how to scramble eggs and make an omelet. He taught me how to catch eels with raw meat, string this all up and then hold it in the water off a long stick at the back of the woolshed dam. He would hang and smoke the eels. He ordered oranges from Gisborne by crate. He bought oysters from Foveaux Straight by crate. He could peel any apple in one peel.
He danced the quickstep and the waltz with me.
One day when I was ten, I had my first fall. I was on one of the station horses, getting used to transitioning from trot to canter. Whenever heading back to the woolshed, the horses, any of them, got the smell of some oats to eat upon the return, they took off. I had to get skilled with the lags and reins with that. The horse took off. I slipped and fell with a thump. Lying there, I heard dad's footsteps, stress and concern as he ran to kneel beside me. I recognized the beauty of his love with a wash of gratitude. When I had my driver's license and drove forty minutes into town to see a friend, I would usually be home just before midnight in all of dark and car beams of unlit country roads. I would tippy toe down the hall to sleep. " Goodnight my dear" he would call out from his bedroom, no matter that the time was well after midnight. Oh, parenthood.
Dad spoke with gratitude that, whilst he was three, his grandad Fred took him on his shoulders outside in the early morning to watching Haley's Comet go by. This was his biggest memory of Fred that he had. Such was a symbiosis- a rub off for Seth, he being his grandson. Dad found the cosmic world out there incredulous. Also, Dad told me he hated his father, so there was the alternative.
Dad kept to few words. He drove safely, dressed for each occasion. Cut his toast in eighths with a knife for his honey on top.
He showed me how to scramble eggs and make an omelet. He taught me how to catch eels with raw meat, string this all up and then hold it in the water off a long stick at the back of the woolshed dam. He would hang and smoke the eels. He ordered oranges from Gisborne by crate. He bought oysters from Foveaux Straight by crate. He could peel any apple in one peel.
He danced the quickstep and the waltz with me.
One day when I was ten, I had my first fall. I was on one of the station horses, getting used to transitioning from trot to canter. Whenever heading back to the woolshed, the horses, any of them, got the smell of some oats to eat upon the return, they took off. I had to get skilled with the lags and reins with that. The horse took off. I slipped and fell with a thump. Lying there, I heard dad's footsteps, stress and concern as he ran to kneel beside me. I recognized the beauty of his love with a wash of gratitude. When I had my driver's license and drove forty minutes into town to see a friend, I would usually be home just before midnight in all of dark and car beams of unlit country roads. I would tippy toe down the hall to sleep. " Goodnight my dear" he would call out from his bedroom, no matter that the time was well after midnight. Oh, parenthood.
SETH
Seth John Tiffen. 1908 - 1992
Dad’s father was Frank Tiffen.
Dad fully converted to American machinery as straight away as imports were possible in the 1950’s - the bulldozer, the tractor, the motor car - all in the 1950’s. His time was a direct study of the transforming qualities of energy that the American economy spearheaded post- World War II visible to all and particularly visible in agriculture. Another surface material I remember him trying was Fiberglass. He laid up sheets of fibreglass in the ceiling of the caravan he built. By now it was 1961. For some reason Wella hair supplements were advertised with the product.1. Pamphlets arrived idiosyncratically in the mailbag. This is to say, that, immediately, the awareness of the industrialized world, both in energy efficiency, chemical research and motorization lifted the hum of all life as the mid - twentieth century emerged. (The Fiberglass industry was German)
I was born a child of the ‘Cold War’. I was a recipient consumer of the technological turning point of domestic life. I had started in a household with kerosene lamps and generated power. In 1958 the light switches came on, also the telephone on at an exchange service for 5 telephone lines with three digits..What ultimately rang a bell for me was Dad building his own Darkroom Enlarger for black and white photography when he was at the boy's school in Wellington, Scots College. This photographic tradition in the family, I thought, really was a thing.
Seth John, born in 1908, not sentimental nor religious, had lain on his bed for almost a year in 1916 with a collapsed lung, so he attended High School at an older age, leaving College nearer to 19 years. I looked into his one Autograph Book. It is from the time of schooling. I decided to allow the object to give me a miniscule context for some ideas fed to him in phrase or by idioms when he was a young man. Given his age, some of the entries were on the tip of daring teases. However, one entry was by his soon to be brother- in- law, Rex. The entry was a judicious English phrase:
Never be afraid to dojustice to others orhave justice done to You. R.H.Witherow. 12/07/26.
He also had a quote from Washington Irving entered by a school friend, Alister Campbell. “Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortune; but great minds rise above it”
If we don’t recall Irving, he became well known in the late 1700’s for two short stories, Rip Van Winkle, a German folktale and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, a rollicking Gothic story set in the Dutch settlement period of early New York. In the story was a Hessian headless horseman. Re: the Hessian, the British hired many land soldiers from Germany during the American Revolutionary War, hence that military portmanteau nickname. (Approximately 30,000 German troops hired by the British to help fight during the American Revolution. )2
The sketch book that contained these was written by Irving who used the nom de’ plume, Geoffrey Crayon.3 Coming upon the Autograph Book with speculations, it is on record that Pinnock is mentioned as having delivered a depressing set of texts that would have covered Rome and the Ancients for school children for many decades. These were the usual stories about power, enemies and rule.
I chose to indirectly cite George Eliot as the web domain name for this project. ‘needed corrective’ is in a phrase in the last chapter of Middlemarch. (1872). I wrote one note after more reading, “It interests me today (19/08/2022) that Pinnock’s prose and Geoffrey Crayon’s amusing, charming and fluent literature got a reference in The Mill on the Floss (1860). In the novel a cousin weighs up to Maggie, her cousin, about a piece of stodgy writing she is reading. Maggie replies from her couch:
"Perhaps it comes from the school diet – watery rice-pudding spiced with Pinnock. Let us hope it will give way before my mother's custards and this charming Geoffrey Crayon” 4
I enjoy the pleasure of seeing dad experiment. He was a descendant of the Enlightenment, to look at his life attitude trajectory this way. To see it in such a way is to see sons and then sons and daughters in education read and write widely so that philosophy and professions expanded from pre-Darwinian thought to post-Darwin life in general knowledge all over the literate world. Discovery was brought to readers that had travelled from the European world to further lands. Stories of the Ancients became Classics. Literature became classics. Dad’s uncles, aunts and his father were grandchildren of the DoctorMonteith.
His grandfather Fred, in his last decades of life, had a large house built in Napier, quite a symbol of his from ‘woe to go’ materially over the seventy- year span. In current times, these seventy- year spans reveal much to us about the impact of humans in the world, our exponential expansion and our energy use. I recall no literature in dad’s lap except for technical. He made thorough reading of the daily newspaper each evening. Farmers in his time worked all week and to midday Saturday: his father before him and his father’s father before him. His grandad Fred went on record in his diaries as not taking a single holiday to Wellington town for sixteen years at one point in his working youth. A couple of times after this he went down to visit, and once took a moment off to attend the races. Great grandad Fred took ten years in his sixties to finally have enough substance, financially, in Napier, to build a large family house.
References1.http://logok.org/wella-logo/; https://www.wella.com/professional/en-EN/family-history#/?_k=k579 2.https://www.google.com/search?q=hessian+soldiers+in+american+revolution&rlz=1CAUWIF_enNZ993&oq=Hessian+soldiers&aqs=chrome.6.0i512l10.10590j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF3. Eliot. G. The Mill on the FLoss. 1860. “Maggie took up the Sketch Book, which lay by her on the table.” (Book 6, Chapter 2 4. The sketch book of Gent, (now an e-book).https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2048/2048-h/2048-h.htm; https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6688/6688-h/6688-h.htm