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.
Halley's comet 1912*
David Robinson with Seth Tiffen. c 1984
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 about when he was three, his grandad Frederick took him on his shoulders outside in the early morning to watch Halley's Comet go by. This was Set's biggest memory of Fred that he had. Such was a symbiosis- a rub off for him, grandfather to first grandson. Dad, and clearly Fred too, found the cosmic world out there incredulous. Also, Dad told me he hated his father, so there was an intense feeling alternative.
Dad kept to few words. He was a happy man. He was meticulously respectful and polite. 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 beautifully with me. He sang the odd romantic song phrases sometimes when he walked outside on the weekends doing domestic tasks. e.g. I Dream of Jeannie with the light Bown hair', a Stephen Foster palour song.
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 about when he was three, his grandad Frederick took him on his shoulders outside in the early morning to watch Halley's Comet go by. This was Set's biggest memory of Fred that he had. Such was a symbiosis- a rub off for him, grandfather to first grandson. Dad, and clearly Fred too, found the cosmic world out there incredulous. Also, Dad told me he hated his father, so there was an intense feeling alternative.
Dad kept to few words. He was a happy man. He was meticulously respectful and polite. 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 beautifully with me. He sang the odd romantic song phrases sometimes when he walked outside on the weekends doing domestic tasks. e.g. I Dream of Jeannie with the light Bown hair', a Stephen Foster palour song.
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.
*
Halley.
Halley's comet and the Transit of Venus all tie up. Halley worked out measurements of Solar Space. Captain Cook was sent to Tahiti to measure this in 1769. Hence, in discovery relted terms, a resultant colonial New Zealand.
Dad’s father was Frank Louis Tiffen. (1873 - 1938)
I was born a child of the ‘Cold War’. I was a recipient consumer of the technological turning point of many western people's domestic and International lives. I had started in a household with kerosene lamps and diesel generated power. In 1958 the light switches came on, also the telephone on at an exchange service for 5 telephone lines with three digits.
Seth John Tiffen, 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 cite George Eliot as the web domain name for this project. ‘a needed corrective’ is in a phrase in the last chapter of Middlemarch. (1872). (19/08/2022) I wrote one note after more reading, “It interests me today 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 Eliot novel, where 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 classical. Scotts College gave dad some schooling. I recall no literature in dad’s lap, once he was a working man and father, 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. Dad's grandad Fred took ten years during his sixties to finally have enough substance, financially, to have a large private family house. Such was a symbol of Fred's ‘woe to go’ frugality and careful materially. Fred's life was an eighty-three- year span, his English childhood in Kent, his working life, his attentions to family and then his final housing ambition, that encapsulates one story. The span reveals much about trajectories of impact of several folks of the early mid 19th Century who arrived in New Zealand and bought land for flock. The swelled numbers of humans in the world, the exponential expansion of resourcing humans, and energy use and ownership of resources would inevitably become content for debates about struggles with illusion of prosperity and the limits to growth.
Dad fully converted to American machinery as imports were possible in the 1950’s - the bulldozer, the tractor, the motor car. 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. A new surface material I remember him trying was Fiberglass. He laid up sheets of fiberglass in the ceiling of the caravan he built. This was in 1961. (An interesting marketing ploy from there, advertising for Wella hair supplements accompanied the product*). 1 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 as was the Wella hair product)
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.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 Geoffrey Crayon, Gent, (now an e-book). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sketch_Book_of_Geoffrey_Crayon,_Gent.