Reihana pronounced the Strangers’ Home to be low-class, for some people there could not afford lodgings of any kind, and were only kept there by Christian charity until they could be returned to their native land, or by earning pennies sweeping the streets. He also complained that the beds were filled with people who were not Christians, but worshipped other gods. I told him I liked the chatter of different tongues, for it reminded me of Babel, where the Lord stepped in to confound the language spoken there, so that we might all speak with different words and scatter ourselves across the earth. If He hadn’t done this, how would our ancestors have found New Zealand? Where would we Maori live now – in the hot desert of the Holy Land?
Colonel Hughes, a kind and Christian man, insisted that the doctor inoculate us all against the smallpox, for it was raging in Limehouse, he said, and throughout the East End. I was to grow far too accustomed to the sight of sufferers of this painful and disfiguring disease. They were everywhere in the streets of London, their faces blotched with red sores, or pitted as though stabbed with a small knife. Some were blind, able only to beg in the street, and many looked as though they longed for death. There was no smallpox at the Strangers’ Home, the Colonel told us, and no cholera, either, or Irish fever. We would be quite safe there, as long as we took care wandering the alleys, yards and courts of Limehouse after dark.
‘I am not afraid of the English,’ Wiremu Pou said, but he never went out without his brother, and once I saw him slip a patu into his coat pocket to use, I assume, if ruffians attacked him.
I must admit that I was a little overwhelmed, if not exactly afraid, for I had never seen so many white faces in one place, and these faces were much whiter than those of the Pakeha in New Zealand. Some looked like ghouls, staring at us wherever we went, their eyes pale in their wan, half-dead faces. Young Hariata Pomare did not like walking outside the Strangers’ Home at all, and whispered that we should not stay in that neighbourhood too long. There were too many Pakeha here, and what if they decided to surround us and kill us? Reihana told her that they would surely kill the godless Lascars first, and Wharepapa assured her that the warriors among us would fight to the death, and see off any number of the pasty English, but she was not comforted.
At first I did not wander much alone, not even during the day, but I could not help but be drawn to the river. One morning I awoke early, and found young Hare Pomare downstairs, smoking on the front steps. Hariata had been awake half the night with sickness, he said. She was sleeping at last, but he was wide awake and restless.
We walked down to the shore, following the smell of the river more than anything, for it was impossible to see until we were nearly upon it. Though it was not long after dawn, many people were out in the streets already – fish merchants pushing their carts and apple vendors filling their baskets, girls sorting bunches of lavender or piling their trays with oranges, men trudging towards the warehouses or the ships. Many people lay asleep in the streets, leaning against walls, slumped in doorways, and on the very stones of the narrow alleys. Whole families, in some cases, lay collapsed in a heap, a baby crying with hunger while its mother and brothers still slept. Many of them were so filthy they looked as though they had rolled in ashes and dust.
We reached a rickety wharf, where steps led down to the river itself. It was low tide, and the muddy shore was dotted with figures, burrowing in the mud. Most of these people were children, bare-legged and already filthy, but some were old women, older than I was. Often I’ve bent over to scoop pipi from the damp sand, but I’ve never had to scavenge for rubbish, like the old women I saw down by the river that day. One was so feeble, she toppled over into the mud, overwhelmed by the wash of waves from a passing boat.
‘What do they look for?’ Hare asked me, for we could see they weren’t digging up shellfish. At first I thought that the children were helping the kuia, or were somehow under their supervision. But the more I watched, the more I realised that the children were in competition with these old women for the bent nails and pebbles of coal that could be pulled from the riverbed. The children were more bold and more agile, unafraid of getting their rags soaked through, even early in the morning, before the sun had warmed the water.
When we next saw Reverend Stack, I told him about this sight, and he said the people we saw were called mudlarks. They made their living from things pulled out of the river, like pieces of wood or rope, or lumps of coal. Sometimes these were stolen from the boats moored nearby. At the most, he thought, these mudlarks could earn a few pennies a day from the things they found and sold, and in the winter they made a desperate sight, standing shivering in the icy water for hours without shoes or a coat.
This was new to us, like so much in London, and surprising to us as well, for London was a wealthy city, the centre of a great empire. It was one thing to run about with no shoes on in Tutukaka, where it was warm for much of the year and shoes would be an encumbrance, but this was a dirty place and a cold place, even now in the summertime. This was something, I suppose, we had not expected to see in England. Perhaps this was part of the education Jenkins wished for us, or perhaps, as he was English himself, it was unremarkable to him, like the billowing clouds of smoke that hid the sky.
As well as Reverend Stack, we were visited by someone else who spoke Maori. This was Mrs Elizabeth Colenso, a lady whose name was known to us all, and who we would grow to like and respect very much. At this time she was in her middle years, neat in her appearance and firm in her manner, with two grown-up children who had accompanied her to England two years earlier. She had dark hair, which she wore in the style of the Queen, and took out small spectacles whenever she had to read.
Of course, we knew the stories about Mrs Colenso and about her husband, for these stories travel about, and there’s little we Maori enjoy more than talking and writing each other letters. The missionaries used to think that we all crowded into their schools to hear the word of God, when really everyone wanted to learn how to read and write the alphabet, so they could talk to their friends in distant places.
The Reverend Colenso, her husband, was known to us as the printer of many Maori books, including the Book of Common Prayer and much of the Bible. Some years before our visit to England he was dismissed by the Church Missionary Society, and left by his wife, after it was discovered that he had another wife, a Maori girl, and that together they had produced a child.
This kind of thing went on all the time in the old days, up in the Bay of Islands. Not with missionaries so much, but with Pakeha men who had a wife here of one race, and a wife there of another, and children of various descriptions running all about the place. We Maori often had more than one wife, so we would laugh at the fuss the missionaries made about such things. But, of course, these were the old days, when much was wrong. Now that we live in modern times, and hold to Christian ways, we must only have one wife at a time, even if we don’t like her much.
In London Mrs Colenso was engaged in work on a new Maori Bible, one that would be complete for the first time. She was checking it, line by line, to make sure of each Maori word for, as she told us, she believed she spoke better Maori than English. Unlike Reverend Stack, she was born in New Zealand, and grew up on a mission far from any other Pakeha. She promised to take an interest in our affairs in London, and told us to summon her whenever we needed her. In London, we would not need to light a fire or wait for a passing boat. We could drop a letter in the post box and it would be with her within an hour or two, for the post boxes were emptied eight times a day!
The next time Reverend Stack returned to the Strangers’ Home, the only person he wanted to see was Haumu, the woman who had lost – and not yet recovered – her senses. He and Jenkins had agreed that she must be sent away to live at a place called the Grove Hall Lunatic Asylum. This was not far from Limehouse, I believe, but was in a place named Bow. We would not be permitted to visit her there, however, for poor Haumu needed complete rest. Mr Lloyd asked why she could not rest at the Strangers’ Home, where the
cost was only eight shillings each week, instead of at Grove Hall, where the sum was much higher, but Te Taka, in his booming voice, declared that she must go and Mr Lloyd dared not quarrel with him.
Ngahuia wept saying goodbye to her, in part because Haumu seemed to have no idea that she was being taken from us. We stood on the steps of the Strangers’ Home to farewell her, but she sat in her cab next to Jenkins, entirely oblivious. Mrs Colenso had given her a new workbag, and she was preoccupied with rifling through it, pulling out all the coloured silks and holding them up to the light.
I wish I could say that this was the only time someone left our party while we were in England, but Haumu’s departure was merely the first. I won’t talk of such unpleasant things now. In those early days in London, we were all excited. Jenkins bustled around making plans for us, and soliciting invitations. We were in London just a day or two, as I recall, when he took us to a service at St Paul’s Cathedral. This was the greatest church in the whole of England, and it was to be our first place of worship in London.
I was pleased that we were going to an Anglican church, because we had been worried on the ship that once we arrived in England Jenkins and his friends would try to turn us all into Wesleyans. Reverend Williams would not be pleased at all if he knew our guide to England was a Wesleyan. The Church Missionary Society looked down on them, for reasons we didn’t understand. Perhaps it was that the Wesleyans were against everything, including playing cards and smoking, though it must be said that Jenkins had supplied us with much tobacco for the voyage over.
Outside, the walls of St Paul’s were black, but inside the huge columns were as white as whalebones and, in the candlelight, the golden ceilings glittered. We couldn’t understand the words of the service, but followed along in our own Maori books, even singing our own Maori words to the hymns. The other people attending the service were much taken with us, clustering around us after the final procession to stare and ask questions of Jenkins. One lad reached up to stroke Wharepapa’s face, tracing his fingers in disbelief along the grooves of the moko. Wharepapa said nothing, but the look on his face was so fierce that the boy’s mother snatched his hand away, and dragged him off through the crowd.
This is the thing I haven’t written of yet, when I speak of our first weeks in London. We were all agog at the many sights of the city, for it was all new to us. But the city was agog at the sight of us, and wherever we went, even if it was just onto the street outside the Strangers’ Home, we attracted much attention. Children ran around us, pulling on our coats and leaping up at us like bumptious dogs, and their elders were little better. People wanted to stare at us, and call out to us, and touch us as we passed. Some seemed almost angry with their shouting. Girls giggled and shrieked, and darted to the other side of the road. Those of us with moko attracted the most attention. We grew so accustomed to seeing people turn from us in disgust, or run from us in terror, that I asked Wharepapa if they thought we might have the smallpox.
‘We don’t have red spots,’ he said. ‘We have green lips.’
’ When we left St Paul’s that day, a huge crowd followed us along the street – encircled us, I should say, so that every way we turned we saw gawping faces. We walked along the riverside, to look upon the great fish market at Billingsgate, but although I could smell it I could see almost nothing, so numerous and determined were our entourage. We came upon London Bridge, and it was Jenkins’ intention that we should cross it, to walk to the other side of the river. The bridge was so thick with people, and horses, and carts, and coaches, that it would be much quicker to cross the river in a wherry.
We had to take care not to be crushed up against the railings, or under rolling wheels. The crowd clustered around us, and we barely needed to move our feet to be carried along. Towering carriages passed, the whips of the drivers tickling the tops of our heads. And the noise of it was an angry storm: policemen’s whistles, the whinnying of horses, shouts and jeers and cries, the rumble of barrels rolling off their cart. A dog, riding high on a stack of crates, barked down at us, startling Ngahuia so much she let out a shriek.
Before we were even halfway across the bridge, Jenkins called to us to turn around, for there was no point in trying to venture further. I felt as though I was back in battle again, besieged, pressed on all sides. These scenes were only to grow worse, I must say, once Jenkins insisted we go about wearing our Maori cloaks, with shark teeth hanging from our ears, for this meant people in all directions would know from a distance that we were foreigners, and rush to see the strange sight.
We had started to hear talk among our Pakeha of a Mr Ridgway, with whom Jenkins had met several times at that gentleman’s office in Leicester Square. This Mr Ridgway had spent much time in New Zealand, and his job was to persuade the English, especially the ones with money, to move to the province of Auckland. Jenkins returned from his first meeting with Ridgway highly pleased and agitated, for he said Ridgway had many influential friends in London, and meant to write to them to announce our arrival.
One of these friends was no less a personage than the Duke of Newcastle, who was in charge of the Colonial Office. Such names and offices meant little to us at the time, but we were to come to know them very well, and to depend on them for much help, though of course we had no inkling of that yet.
Ridgway, Jenkins warned us, was koroke – that is to say, a little strange in his manner, and maybe his head – so when he visited us at the Strangers’ Home, we were very curious to meet him. We stood around one of the long tables in the back room, looking out over the yard where washing hung from the line, spotted with soot. Mr Ridgway walked around the table to greet us, shaking hands with all the men, and kissing the ladies’ hands, which pleased them very much.
We all started laughing, for he was a strange kind of man, loud in his voice, with red hair as frizzy as a rata bloom, and a very intent stare. He was hearty and friendly, Mr Ridgway, but there was an intelligence, a wiliness, in his eyes that told us all he was not a buffoon. He also had a certain manner of looking at Jenkins, in particular, which I observed at once, as though Jenkins was the koroke one.
Mr Ridgway was a great friend to New Zealand, he told us, and to the Maori people, and he would do all he could to ensure we received all the attention and respect we were due in England.
‘None of these casual exhibitions your friend Mr Jenkins speaks of,’ he said, shaking Jenkins by the shoulder in a rough but friendly manner. Jenkins did not look pleased, and neither did Mr Lightband, who was translating for us. ‘You must be recognised as ambassadors, yes? Honoured guests of the British people. Don’t you fear, I will see to it.’
The morning after this visit, Mrs Colenso called to take Hariata Pomare, Ngahuia and Tere Pakia shopping for fine dresses. These new clothes were the gifts of Mr Ridgway. From that day forward, Ngahuia would not hear a word about Mr Ridgway being koroke.
We liked Mr Ridgway, and we liked the promises he made, but these did not deter Jenkins and his associates from their plans. There were many places to see, Mr Lightband told us, but not enough money in the coffers to take us about, especially if we were to travel beyond London. Before many days had passed, Jenkins told us that we must all dress in our cloaks, and attend our first meeting. This would take place in a religious meeting house, and the people coming there were considering emigration to New Zealand. Jenkins would talk, and we would give a speech or two, and then perform haka and waiata for the audience. This was to be our first public engagement in London and, he said, would bring us much attention.
Wharepapa, I think it was, questioned performing haka in a place of worship.
‘This is not right,’ he told Jenkins. ‘We will sing, perhaps, if it seems to us the right thing to do. Paratene will suggest a hymn.’
I’m afraid I don’t remember very much of this first public meeting, or whether we sang a hymn or not. We were to attend so many hundreds of them that often one is the same as the next in my memory. I seem to remember that the audienc
e was small, but very attentive, and I suppose we dressed in cloaks and carried the weapons we’d brought from New Zealand, so we might show them to the English.
I do remember, quite distinctly, that Reihana argued with Jenkins about the wearing of cloaks. He was given a korowai to drape over his usual clothing, and he complained that he had not worn such a garment in many years.
‘These things harbour fleas,’ he said, offending Mr Brent, who had brought this particular cloak with him from Nelson. It had cost him ‘more than a bob or two,’ he said, protesting that no fleas had ever been near it.
Reihana agreed, at last, to wear the korowai, but he argued with Jenkins all the way to the meeting place. Hadn’t Mr Ridgway told us such ‘exhibitions’ would not be required? How could Jenkins think of us performing the devil’s own haka in a place of worship? Why should we be asked to do anything we did not wish to do?
‘Because we all need money!’ exclaimed Mr Lloyd, who always grew impatient very quickly. He didn’t seem to like London. He always looked worried.
Mr Ridgway was as good as his word, securing us an appointment with the Duke of Newcastle at the Colonial Office. The meeting was short, but we liked the Duke, with his nest of a beard and bright eyes. Wharepapa spoke for all of us when he asked the Duke if we would be able to meet the Queen. Jenkins translated the words, and told us that the Duke said he would do all he could. Unfortunately, the Queen was still in deep mourning following the death of her husband two years earlier, and she was very little in London.
I think this meeting may have taken place in the Grosvenor Hotel, for by this time Jenkins had told us to pack our boxes at the Strangers’ Home. We had lived there for two weeks, and now could undertake the move he had promised, to far superior accommodation in the west of London.
This move was the cause of another argument with Reihana. We climbed out of our cabs, astonished by the hotel’s size and grandeur. Inside, marvelling at its vaulted ceiling and marble floors, I wondered if this building had once been a church. We were all quite overawed, I think, for even Ngahuia and Tere Pakia ceased their usual chatter, and we all stood about the lobby rather than sit in one of its many armchairs, for fear that we would be chased away.