Jan 22, 2003
Grandma had a red headed sister called Maggie, who married Samuel Barr, - he who was said to have died in the DT’s. Be that as it may, between them they produced seven children. Their misfortune however was that the family was rife with Tb, and all but one of the kids died before they reached adulthood. The surviving child was my father’s cousin Mignon. (Her son Jim White, worked for the Lands and Survey, and got me vacation employment as an assistant chainman in the summer of 1951 and 52, surveying blocks around Methven for subdivision into farms for returned soldiers, and then surveying for a notional hydro scheme between Murchison and the Nelson lakes.)
I only met Mignon briefly a few times, when she was already over seventy, but she was impressive. My Dad had often spoken of her with admiration and affection. She had been a nursing sister in the First World War, and by a long coincidence she had been the ward sister in the military hospital at Brockenhurst (England) when he found himself assigned there after he had been shot up on the Somme. He recalled the long ward, (it looked like a tent in the photo he had of it) and his joy at seeing this pretty nurse appear at the end of it, and come looking for her cousin. Presumably she’d seen his name on the casualty list.
My main impression of Mignon was of self disciplined capability, and of kindness without sentimentality. I imagine that when you’ve grown up watching your brothers and sisters die one by one, you would get to be like that, if you didn’t go to pieces altogether. When she was about fourteen she was sent up to Wellington with her younger sister Daisy to be near her brother who was in hospital there with Tb. Her mother couldn’t get away, having troubles enough of her own back in Reefton. My Grandma lived in Wellington at that time, but though she visited the kids in the boarding house where they stayed, she never invited them home, for fear they might bring the infection with them. It’s hard nowadays to comprehend such callousness born of fear. Mignon grew up in a hard world.
I first met her when my brother Darcy and I were at Training College in Christchurch, and we went to visit her one Saturday morning at her little house in Spreydon or Sydenham somewhere. She had been long since widowed then, old White having passed in his check early on. I don’t know much about him, except that he was a devout Mason. Mignon was one of those people who like to rearrange the furniture from time to time, so when poor old White came home from Lodge late one night somewhat the worse for it, he made an unsuccessful attempt to get into bed in the dressing table before he realised the furnishings had been interchanged during his absence. I don’t know for sure whether such things contributed to his early demise.
One way and another Mignon had a pretty lean time of it, and when Darcy and I met her she was eking out a living at the age of seventy-five by caring for old men of sixty, who thought they were too old to take care of themselves. She had married one of them, either out of propriety or convenience, I don’t know, a gentle old fellow, carefully swaddled in tweed jacket and waist coat, plus fours and tweed cap. He would dutifully and cautiously take his constitutional walk each day as if his bones were made of chalk.
Mignon invited us to stay to lunch, which consisted of boiled silverbeet on toast. She must have put butter and pepper and things with it, for it was quite delicious, but it occurred to me afterwards that that was probably all she had. Half a loaf of bread and some silverbeet from the garden. She could have told us that she wasn’t ready to have us to lunch, or to push off and get ourselves a pie or something, but hospitality demanded otherwise. Besides she was in the habit of solving problems, not skirting round them.
The next time I met her, she must have been well into her eighties. She came to visit my mother after my Dad died. By then she was fairly shrunken and a bit stooped, but I remember her getting out of the car and straightening herself as well as she could, and walking pretty briskly up the front path as befits a nurse on duty, regardless of the pain in her joints. She greeted me with a little smile, as if to say, “There! What do you think of that?”
The house at Taradale was a big old place with a collection of sheds and outhouses around a sort of courtyard at the back, under a walnut tree. Mignon stood at the top of the back steps and surveyed the area with a twinkle in her eye, and assessed its possibilities as a source of revenue. Looking at the woodshed she said “A decent widower in there, would bring thirty shillings a week, and then that wash house could be done up to accommodate an old couple, past the silly stage of course. Yes, they would do very nicely in there.” It was a good joke. Far from being a skinflint, her own generosity was legendary.
At that time her home was in Darfield, but she also maintained a flat in Christchurch, and when my sister’s son went to Christchurch to start at university Mignon offered him the use of it while he found a place of his own. However on his way south he met up with a couple of fellow students who were likewise without a place to stay, and he invited them to share Mignon’s flat with him. Later, when my sister was rather shamefacedly explaining this piece of freeloading to Mignon she was surprised to get the cheery response, “Praise be to God in His kindness!” And when Hilary muttered, “What about the kindness of Mignon?” Mignon replied without hesitation, “Oh no! I was but His instrument.”
May she rest in peace. If St Peter is any sort of an organiser he will have her greeting the weary new arrivals up there and letting them know that, whatever they may have suffered along the way, from here on everything will be alright.