HOUSE-BUILDING.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 181, 1 August 1936, Page 1 (Supplement)

HOUSE-BUILDING.

SAWING YOUR OWN TIMBER. «NEVER CROSS-CUT WITH A FRIEND."

(By M.E.S.)

They are building a house on the farm next door. The timber has to be carted thirty miles from the rail and, although the road is metalled, one bridge was swept away by the February floods and has not yet been repaired. This necessitates the negotiating of a sometimes troublesome ford cud there has been a good deal of grumbling about it, though of the good-natured kind. "These backblocks!" one man said jeeringly. "Suppose this- is the pioneering you're always writing about?"

Pioneering? Well, hardly. 1 had just returned from the genuine backblocks and the contrast struck me forcibly. The Ridge, to misname that part of the world, is forty miles still further backand, although the slump brought the compensation of roads, metalled by the unemployed, the settlers had then struggled for more than thirty years behind tracks of mud and clay that were veritable barriers all winter. Yet there is about their lives a dignity, a spaciousness, a sense of comfort and of permanency not always found in our suburban districts with their electricity, their motor buses and their bitumen roads.

Individualism the Secret. The pioneers do not speak readily of their trials, and, seeing them now. comfortably set in their charming homes, every house with its garden and tennis court, and with a golf course of the communal variety, you might imagine tliem to have been those fortunate creatures. wealthy men who had obtained •rood land for a. song in the early days. Neither supposition is correct; the land is notoriously difficult, nor have the pioneers been men blessed with abundant capital. The country is "as steep as the side of a house," with a rainfall that is far too heavy and a treacherous river that makes all access difficult. The secret of their-success?. Perhaps it lay in their individualism; the men were land-lovers, the women home-makers,; they came to settle, not migrate; to develop, not exploit. Therefore they met difficulties as natural and not phenomena] dispensations'. The women, of course, had their share of hardship, beginning married life (in each case after a youth spent in town) in punga and raupo whares. watching their men hew farms and homes out of standing bush. The struggle of that building! Fortunately, several of the little band were capable carpenters, for vour pioneer must be "handy with tools": but first of all the trees must be felled, every foot of timber pit-sawn —and, "if you want a job that is apt to break the fastest friendship, just try pit-sawing." they told me. I can we'll believe it. for my own experience of rross-euttiii<r is that it may drive a liapnv marriage to tremble on the brink of divorce in one hot afternoon.

Pit-sawing has all the wearisome unpleasantness of ordinary erosscuttimj multiplied many times. One man stands in (he bottom of a pit and the saw is drawn strai»ht up and down from one to the other. Tf. therefore. Hs ponv«e is clicked suddenly, either by a knot or bv a mistake of the =awver above, both men hump their heads, the man above on the wooden end or tiller, the unfortunate below on the "box" of the saw. Such conditions are not conducive to cordiality, and 1 have seen two men. both tired and exasperated, cease work and indulge in home truths most startling in character.

Recriminations. Curiously enough, lightness on a saw or on a horse's reins must be born in a man; it is very seldom cultivated, even by long years of vituperation from othei bushmen. Lately a friendship of many years' standing suffered its first setback over a post-splitting contract. The partners were crosscutting a mighty totara and the day had been long and exceeding hot. The big man was obviously heavy 011 tli& saw, putting far more energy into the job than was necessary and thereby increasing the arduousness of the other's work. At last the little man's patience was exhausted and he said querulously, "If you must ride, Tom, for God's sake go home and get a Saddle." A pause ensued during which each, lost to all sense of humour and old friendship, glared resentfully at the other; then the big man dropped his end of the saw and the contract and walked off with a ludicrous air of offended dignity. Moral: Sever crosscut with your fricyul, because you .may lose him; or with your wife, because you can't lose her. . .

Two good men working long hours can pitsaw a thousand feet of timber in a week, and this includes the felling of the tree. Therefore, I could well believe what the pioneers told me, that it had taken them from two to three months and more merely to procure the timber for those comfortable houses that I took so much as a matter of course. They work, of course, in all weathers—except a deluge —«by erecting tents over theii pits. The location-of the pits is important, for the logs must be rolled, jacked or dragged into place on the skids, and from the' skids transferred one at a time to the transomes or supports that run across the top of the pit. The .man who stands' on top has the heavier job, for he must pull the saw up at every cut and also, follow the markings upon the log; but the man below has an unpleasant time, working in dust" and heat, blindly and monotonously.' So that, by the time they had pitsawn ten thousand feet of timber the settlers considered that they had earned their houses.

Difficult Loads. "Hut the packing of bricks for the chimney was worse," they told me, "ami securing a bricklayer who'd come into the backblocks." "And, worst of all. persuading hi.in to stay when he got there," added another. ' "The first one lasted 24 hours, then a niorepork blundered into his tent and he developed nerves. The second was wet through in the ford, and decided that he was in for pneumonia-. The third was our lucky one, chiefly because he was so drunk when he left town that he didn't sober up till he'd "been 24 hours 011 the job, and he thought he might as well stick it out."

They told me strange tales of packing corrugated iron, of manoeuvring the long and swaying loads along bush tracks, of placing them and replacing them on a windy, day; stories of the packing of windows, of a dreadful night when a storm upon the mountains sent the river up in a few hours, and all hands out at midnight to rescue their new-cut timber and prevent it floating out to sea. "Hut it all ended happily, as you see. and there are always difficulties in everything you undertake."

Difficulties ? Yes. My neighbours are having difficulties too. ' They think me a trifle unsympathetic when the workmen grumble about the isolation, the endless troubles of building in the backblocks. "Look at that lorry now. It's having its work cut out to climb this narrow, winding road with that load." they tell me. Rut I was not looking at the lorry. Instead I seemed to see a. train of packhorses winding through a bush track, a pit in which men toiled like galley-slaves to build a dwelling, to found a home.