Dorothy Murray

DOROTHY: I've got a memory of going to kindergarten at St Margaret's, and after that perhaps no so much of that early stage. I have this picture and memory of trying to get to the kindergarten by myself, at say five. It was in the old Cranmer Square building and two girls slightly older than me got me in the playground and twisted my wrists because I said "Mondee Tuesdee Wenesdee Thursdee." You are to say "Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday." I know these girls' names still: Gretchen Sergeant and Hilary - oh it doesn't matter. My parents pronounced the words Mondee and so on.

The older ones (in our family) all went to St Margaret's for a short period David and Roger and Ruth all went there. David was born in 1910, and I was born in 1915. However we didn't stay long at St Margaret's. It was found that St Michael's, known as St Michael's Church Day School, ran very good school, and clearly it would have been better for us to go there, particularly the boys.

My impression is that St Michael's School was staffed by five very good teachers. I can almost remember their names: Sinclair, Kiver, Spragg and Steads, all Misses. But they were warriors and wonderful. The big impression of that school is that the school ground to a halt if there was any cheating, lying, stealing or anything. I've got that clearly in my mind. It's not harmful at all, really. They handled it all properly. As I remember, there was strapping, it was the norm then. It was taken seriously; I doubt if anyone would offend twice.

David was called a swot, from the age of about thirteen. He was very very thorough in his learning. He was dux of St Michael's and he got very good marks at Christ's College. Totally earnest. And Roger went off to Cathedral Grammar School because his voice was used, and it was a wonderful education for him. Evensong two or three times a week, a wonderful thing for him because he made great use of it and he had a lovely singing voice and eventually did a Mus Bac (Bachelor of Music Degree).

RACHEL: I know David admired his father enormously and he said that that was really the main reason why he went into the church. One reason was he only had three models of what men did, and the other one was that he really admired his father and liked the way people looked up to him. Is that how you felt about him too? [Rachel's comments included here to make sense of Dorothy's answer.]

DOROTHY: Oh yes, possibly more so than my sisters. Dad was always mellow, I think. He was often the leading joker of the family and dropped his church ways at home for us. He was fun. I remember we had the tonic solfa on the kitchen wall for singing, which could be frequent and impromptu. So that was nice for the few of us that didn't have any musical education. Roger and as late as Tessa had some music training.

From Dad I got the message "Live your life decently." There was a woman who was known to our family more particularly in later years, and she said in our house one day to my mother, and I heard it, "There's no such thing as partial honesty." Honesty is honesty, nothing more or less. She was a school teacher. That stuck in my mind, which didn't do any harm.

My mother was excessively busy. When you think she ran a big Sunday School on Sundays, and ran the Mothers' Union! She had to learn to speak and ultimately give little lectures. She was a trained school teacher in England. She married I think at 23, so with a huge family and a huge vicarage and a busy husband she didn't have any time for socialising or for teaching. I assume her teaching was valuable in the kindergarten she ran.

Washing took all day. Life was a different pace, and a lot of demands with telephones ringing. They always went out for dinner on Easter Day every year, to Warners Hotel, which was a blessing, and it would have costa bit. It was the end of Lent, you see.

We learned housekeeping and childcare gradually. I have a picture in my mind of dishwashing. The sink is here and somebody is washing, somebody is drying, and from there on, others of the family are dotted, passing the dried dishes along, and the last one puts it away. A very efficient method. I haven't seen it done like that since!

I have a memory of cleaning the brass plates and the brass front door step. Domineering women of the parish would notice. We would sleep in the verandah, and they would perhaps come, and we'd be in bed on the verandah and they'd say, "Hmm, this door plate hasn't been cleaned for a while!" Narrow minded, wasn't it?

I suppose it took us 15 or 20 minutes to walk to primary school.

I left school when I was turning fifteen. My birthday is in January. Yes, that was bad. And never corrected. I had a friend, Margaret Dalziel, who said to me, "You never went back to school?" "No,", I said. At the time I didn't seem to mind much. There was this baby Tessa to look after, which I did, and the washing up, bossing the rest of the family to tidy up or something. But I know that that was a serious drawback, and nobody, least of all me I'm afraid, thought of anything.

Mum and Dad went to Amberley soon after I left school, so I went with them. It was retirement time for Dad, time for him to take on more work, which he did till he was 88 or something. It was at Amberley that I got the idea that I was uneducated. I was 16 or 17. At Amberley there was a WEA group, and I found that I was out of my depth. I kept quiet, but I listened.

I still feel it today. You'll die laughing about what we've been doing at our church - talk about doing different things! A young student from the theological college got a few degrees but is not wanting to be ordained as a priest. She asked if she could come to our parish and conduct a course on Human Sexuality. Of course I went. I knew I wouldn't be able to hold my own, but I went. There were seven of us only, and this girl was marvellous. There was one woman of about 40 or 50, there was another couple of 70, and there was a nice man who'd been in a monastery. This girl was very good at it, and the vicar was there, and it was an eye opener for all of us.

I was taken out of school because of finances, and Mother having her eighth child, and they wrongly read me as being domesticated. I was in a Home Science class, which was a bad mistake early on. Some of the teachers were bad, there was a Miss Hooper - she'd only got to walk in the door and everyone would start laughing and talking and throwing apples.

One of my friends in that class left and went to St Margarets, and I watched her career. My parents thought that St Margaret's was not a good education, and so we were sent to St Michael's and to the Girls' High School. Ruth went to the Girls' High School happily, she was fortunate, and she was put in the A class.

Priscilla, somehow, being much later did go to St Margaret's, and so did Teresa. They're both inclined to sneer at St Margaret's but at the time they were there, it was all right. Tessa's naughty. Priscilla was a bit too clever for her own boots! Tessa went straight into nursing, then she went to England for the O.E. and she got keen on the Maudsley Hospital, and worked there for a while. Then a letter came to us saying she was going to be there for five years. That took a lot of bravery.

Time went on and I went to work at Josephine's Kitchen. A cake shop, beautiful cakes! Three years I was there.

The headmistress of Amberley House School had come out form England to St Margaret's and was a year or two at St Margaret's. And she knew the Taylor family ad the Archdeacon, and she was made headmistress of Amberley House. What a job she had!

I was in the vicarage and she said, "What about being a house matron?" It was very pleasant. It was a lovely school. There was a very good swanky matron, she was quite a character. The staff were all "ladies" and it was actually an extremely happy place. We rode horses and we swam and played tennis, and it was a very nice school.

The war intervened, and it was said that the Japanese were going to come up the beach and take the school. That was a bit nasty, so it all disintegrated. Whereupon Mrs Young got hold of me smartly. It was the old "Archdeacon's daughter" that carries a lot of weight.

But I happened to like the work and I got fond of the girls. Ila [Isla?] Hunter was the housemistress, and it was a happy place, but desperately badly run, and short of staff, no cooks, terrible! I was often cooking, in a kitchen 12 feet by 9 feet, I'll never for get that. For 70 girls and 10 staff and another 10 domestic staff - if you could get them.

But we had good companionship, excellent women. Ila Hunter who is, to this day, remarkable. Margaret Dalziel who's got the OBE and has a great brain, but such a ice person. Clara McKinnon who died was an excellent Latin mistress, and Mary Foster-Browne, Mary Griffin, and someone who was called Mavis Greards [?] who was wonderful too.

When my parents first met Celia, I wouldn't like to say what they thought of her. Probably thought, "David's got engaged, that's nice. She's a local girl, been to Rangi Ruru." We had a lot of snobbery in those days. The rebel side of Celia was a bit difficult. David was 110% saintly, and he was patient with Celia, rightly so. I think if Celia tried to do battle with my parents they put her in her place. In a way she wasn't an ideal parson's wife, she didn't want to be one. She went to the Chathams, though! I didn't love Celia, I don't think our paths crossed terribly much. I would have been five or six years younger than her. And then she became very busy, with a big family, and she wasn't much in Christchurch.

I got closer to David as the years went on. Tessa and I minded the six (or was it five at the time?) children to send David and Celia away for a holiday. That meant moving into the Akaroa vicarage. I remember you got a tummy bug and you were all vomiting in your beds and into your plaits at night. So Tessa and I had to wash five heads of hair, and plait them. Never mind, we survived, we survived. Tessa you see is fifteen years younger than me, so she would have been quite youngish. We didn't really mind, it was all in a day's work. Jill was the big sister. If we didn't know where the lentils were, we could ask her.

I also went to stay with you in Fairlie, that's where I went to stay as a guest. David took me on this outing round the district, visiting these people on the sheep stations. Snobbery again! The hierarchy!

David's role in the Ruth-David-Roger-Dorothy family was "the wit." In his Christ's College days, one boy at a Christ's College dance told me, "Oh, David Taylor, he's a swot." Dismissed! You know. So I thought, "Oh well, at home he's not."

There was fun at home. My mother had a sense of humour and my father did too. As smaller children we played in the back garden at Madras Street. I've got a friend to this day, Ngaire - and Tom Penny, who are married, and grandparents and retired: Ngaire will tell me that the joy of her life was to go and play with the Taylors in their back garden.

And we had an old wheelchair, which was jumble sale stuff you know, and this garden at the back was sloped, so it was hair-raising stuff to be pushed by one of these brothers in this wheelchair. And Ngaire couldn't come often enough apparently - still remembers it. That goes back to me at seven or eight or nine.

And there was this big old shed at the back which served a variety of uses according to our needs at the time. It housed jumble sale things. It also (I understand now) was a sleepout when the family got bigger. A couple of stretchers would be there, and David and Roger would sleep there... perhaps when they came home from College House or perhaps before they'd even gone, I wouldn't know. It was solid, big, if would have held three or four beds if need be. We'd put people up sometimes.

Elizabeth and I, when we were Standard 6 or bigger, slept in a double bed, in the bedroom that faces south. They were biggish bedrooms. Ruth had a bedroom to herself. Two stretcher beds on the verandah. Directly David and Roger, aged 17 or 18, went to University, they lived in at College House for their Theological training. So at least my mother had that reprieve, and the bed situation would have been much better. And Ruth got married, you see, at 23.

Our parents taught us that marriage was the ultimate thing. They were very happily married. And the right vocation. She polished her act and she could address the Mothers Union. Ruth and Gordon's was an extremely happy marriage. My mother adored Gordon Mirams. He and she would have terrific fun together. You know the expression, "She has to get married"? Well, that was a current saying, none of this de facto business of course. Somebody had to get married, but Gordon had a bit of a play ont his, and said, "Really Mrs Taylor!" (or Aggie, he called her, so did the older ones, but it didn't actually stick) and he railed at her for using that expression.

They say that I'm very like my mother to look at now. I probably talk like her.

We had a very good model of marriage form our parents, and there were others around me also, very happy relationships, fun and games.

There were kindnesses in the parish. I can remember the parish sending Mum and Dad on a holiday to Nelson, in the latter years when they bally well did need holidays.

Money problems did leave a real... I say you kids don't know what you're... I think it scarred me a bit, and there are lots like me, even here. They suffered from this too. It was the Slump, and World War 2.

The Slump was grim, because we still had to help the down-and-outs. The church pays better now, they assume you have to eat, and they get these cuts for the snobby schools. Lack of money was a BIG THING, A BIG THING.

Bread and dripping. Beautiful dripping! It had some taste. Toast and dripping is all right. I think we were fed well. I only mean bread and dripping like a rare evening tea meal, you see, because we had dinner middle day. No, Mother didn't know about cooking at all, initially, but she learnt perforce. I suppose it's the hardest teacher, isn't it? A coal range in the kitchen and a gas stove in the back kitchen. Three hundred pounds a year, and eight children.

My father's sisters were Kate and Maud.

Maud kept a boarding house in London for medical students. Oh yes, and she got very fond of all these young men, and they used to come back and see her.

Kate was a fully trained nurse, and was head matron of Norwich Hospital, and sent all eight of us (or perhaps not Tessa) five bob postal orders for birthday and I think Christmas. This was gold! Oh yes, we kept it, it was her own. Kate was one of these saints, a properly practising Anglican.

None of them ever came out to New Zealand. Well, in those days it was a bit of a hurdle.

The only person who came out was Ethel T Ellis, a wonderful spinster, Anglican, devout. No relation, my mother's schoool friend. Lived near. I've been back, and I've spent time with Ethel Ellis. Ethel Ellis was a remarkable woman. She had money. She came out twice.

I've been to the church where my mother's father Warburton has his name in the vestry of the church there, in Birmingham [?]. My mother's family was Welsh, way back. Her parents died early, we didn't have them as grandparents overseas, we had this wonderful Kate. And then we met Mary when I was fully grown up. Maud was married, Maud and Frank. They died soon after I was grown up.

We did get to know Gwyneth and Mary, who were my aunt Peggy's children. They were cousins on my mother's side. We didn't keep in touch with them.

My mother's father was a merchant, that's all I know. My father's father did something in London, I don't know what.

Uncle Joe and Aud[rey], they were wealthy, comfortably, off, and almost came to New Zealand. The Korean War stopped them. It was just as well, because they were comfortably off, and my poor mother would... She had Ethel Ellis (Ethel Tits as Gordon used to call her, because she didn't have any) and she adapted and adjusted and was no problem.

But Joe and Aud would have been. They would have got a bit of a culture shock. Mother would have worried about that, because she was fond of them. Joe and Aud were such fun. They moved a bit as they got older, and I stayed with them in a Sussex village called Puallborough, which is well known, and quite a big place. Audrey drove an ambulance in the war, night and day. He was older, and more anxious. Sense of humour, sense of humour, and very kind too, I saw. No family, never had a child.