There were only 5 or 6 houses in the small village of Mokau in 1920 when Molly Black was born. In those days there was still a large community of Maori in the area. Mollys father and his brother had bought land together in Mokau near the river and built a kauri farmhouse at the top of a hill with a view of the Mokatahina Station. Molly’s grandfathers’ father had come out on one of the first two ships that came to New Plymouth and he settled there to run a hotel. Her grandfather and his brother both went north to live at Awakino and established the Black families in the area.
Molly was second born and the only girl of three children. Her mother went to New Plymouth for the birth. “She probably had to come home by sea. I’m glad I wasn’t able to know about it. I never wanted to go out over that bar, not Molly.”
Molly was a tomboy, the ‘third boy and from an early age rode around the farm with her brothers on the old horse Mary, who would stop if they fell off. When her older brother was 2 he became asthmatic and was sent to live with an aunt in a drier part of the country, and Molly and her younger brother grew up on the farm and would walk 2 miles to school each day.
“When it was fine and the tide was out, off came the boots and we’d cross over the mudflat. I like the Maori people; I had good Maori friends at school. In those days there were a lot at my school and every now and then they’d speak in their own tongue. I thought it was very cruel, the teachers would smack them; I didn’t think it was necessary. They’d go home and teach what they’d learnt to their parents who could then order things at the shop and so forth.When I was older I didn’t go to dances, mother didn’t believe in that sort of thing. Occasionally if I was staying with somebody else and they were all going to a dance, well of course Molly went too. Mother was quite strict in a way, but she was lovely. She didn’t do much on the farm; it was a partnership between the two brothers.
Even though the old kauri homestead is now long gone and the farm sold Molly still has many memories of life as a child in Mokau.
“We had chooks on the farm. Oh, my grandmother had given my mother 6 hens not long before, and mother had to go out this particular day to collect my grandmother who was coming to stay. And there was my older brother Don and I; I held the chook on the block while Don cut his head off, it was a little tomahawk he had, and I held again, and he cut another ones head off! I think we did 5 of them! And we had them half plucked when mum came home! He would have been 4 and I was 3. “What have you done?” Great excitement you see! “Come and see what we’ve got for Grans’ dinner.” What we didn’t know was these chooks we had killed, they were all nice brown egg ones you know, and easy to catch. And we’d killed them!
Molly, like her father, never learnt to drive. Her father used a sled and horses on the farm and her Uncle drove a dray.
In the early days, Molly’s mother owned one of the first motorcars in Mokau which automatically made her and car the ambulance and driver as well as the school bus! “She did all sorts of things that other women didn’t do, no-one bossed her. She did what she wanted to do. And she was happy. She stayed in Mokau until she died, they both did.
She’d come down in the car to the roadway which was just mud at the time especially if it was a very wet season. She’d drive out onto the mudflat with chains on and then go back up on the road. She never got stuck; she just drove at a normal speed. That strip of road was awful, it would be that deep in mud – then when they eventually metalled it, it was wonderful, she could run right down it.”
The farm overlooked the small river island of ……. The brothers leased the land adjacent to the island from the local maori to run cattle.
“That island has a little history. It was the only place around here where the Maoris could go if there was a war on, and the tide could go right around it, and there was water on the island, a spring – they could live there for as long as they liked.”
Today there is a small urupa or Maori cemetery on the island which can be accessed at low tide.
Molly also remembers the small Maori village down by the bridge near the old cream factory. “There was a log on the side of the river for many years. It’s gone now but no one was ever allowed to put an axe into it. Do NOT put an axe into it! You could walk on it and do anything else you liked but you couldn’t chop it or cut it or hurt it in any way. The shadow of a chief went across it and it had become very sacred. But of course there had to be someone put an axe into it, and I think about 3 days later, he drowned! I was a little child but I knew of it happening.”
Molly never went to secondary school. She was taken to Auckland when she was 17 and began nursing training which she liked but which came to a halt when she realised she had to do theatre work as well. Then she learned dressmaking for several years. “I did mostly men’s work, and other peoples work. If someone made a mistake it all came to Molly’s desk. Nowadays you have every opportunity to do all sorts of things. I don’t know what I would do if I had another chance – you had to think only of the things you could do. The best thing out was some other firm had made thousands of pairs of trousers – and they’d made them all without pockets. It was great. We made the pockets; you could make $30 a day doing it. We fixed up hundreds of pairs of trousers in a day!
Nursing was a job where Molly could get into mischief. “You weren’t allowed out. This particular night I went out without leave, and I came home late to the nurses’ home. I got almost across to the nurse’s home when I saw the night sister – she didn’t see me, but I happened to see her. And between the nurses home and the sister there was a tree just here with Molly inside it. And I saw sister come into the home – and I’m still in the tree; she went upstairs (I could see the torch see) and she came out the front door and she went along that side of the garden and poked around down there and she went along that side and poked around down there. But she never saw me!
We used to climb out the window. There were one or two nurses who abided by the rules but I don’t think I had as much fun as I did nursing.
“I haven’t lived here all my life. But I’ve lived here in this cottage for the past 30 or so years. I was born in 1920. I’m knocking 90. I have kept good health but I’m starting to go a little bit deaf; I do have a hearing aid. I still have got a memory, but I think it beginning to slacken a little bit. I do think these stories should be told. Everyone has got a different story.”
Molly remembers only one shop when she was a child, then another was built around 1923, and then the tearooms once the road had been metalled. She was 7 years old when the bridge opened in 1927,a time of great importance for the community and a highlight in her own life. She was on the last historic barge trip across the river.
“The first car that came across, they decided it was about 13 or 14 horsepower. 13 horses would cost 13 pennies to go across. So the ferryman charged him 13 pennies to take his car across. It would be one penny for a horse. The cars were only a few horse power in those early cars.“
Molly was married for 62 years although she never had children of her own. Her husband had been the 9th child in the family and Molly believes was so spoilt that he thought he could boss her around. “No-one bossed me around. That wasn’t what Molly intended! After a year or two of quietly doing my own thing he saw that I was very determined and he had better straighten himself up!” They lived in Auckland for many years before Molly came back to Mokau “about 30 years ago”. She lives in an old cottage on the main road, where she spends her leisure time sitting out in her sunny back porch in the fresh air playing hand games which she says teaches her all sorts of new swear words and keeps her brain active. Her house is filled with many antiques treasures and memorabilia that she intends to eventually donate to the local Tainui Museum. She has also created and collected a wealth of hand made textiles that are imbued with history, having squirreled away fabrics and wool over many years. These have been made into appliqué wall hangings that took the best part of six months to make, patchwork curtains of ancient fabrics, knitting and crochet and endless other creations.
“Most of the work of that type of thing now is done on the machine, but I like hand work. Those fabrics are at least 40 or 50 years old.” A fire screen completed by her mother in 1930 is an intricate tapestry of a New Zealand scene all made with the last bits of darning wool she had used for her husbands socks.
“I’m not clever myself but I do get the odd bit of inspiration. I’m quite good with my hands. And I love tiny little things, so I thought I’d fill my cabinet with them. I’ve got little crystals and there’s a lot of old stuff in here so I thought the whole lot could go to the museum eventually. This is what I am. The house has to be walls, but it’s what you make of the inside of it.”
“I feel I have just come through one of the most interesting periods that anyone could go through. I came through the time of horse and cart, the first cars, the first roads from metal to tar-seal – I’ve seen everything. I mostly walked around. The horses used to tip me off, it was safer to walk. I saw the primitive before I saw the space travel. I’ve seen it all.”