Hardship Unbelievable

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 270, 13 November 1937, Page 2 (Supplement)

Hardship Unbelievable

Sixty-four years have passed since Clemency-Jane, very young and very forlorn, left the friendly shores of England and journeyed with her husband to the strange and far-off colony of New Zealand. Clemency-Jane was a pioneer—an inexperienced pioneer, bewildered and very afraid—but a pioneer stout of heart and with soaring hopes for their life in this new and little country that promised so much. They were promises, alas, that were never to have their fulfilment. In the years that were to come ClemencyJane drank deeply of the cup of hardship and sorrow and disappointment. She knev/ isolation in its truest sense. As the weeks lengthened into months and the months into years, she toiled and worked, helping in the hard, heart-breakinc work of clearing the land, tirelessly striving to make of their rough bush shack a place they could call home. Day after day she sewed and baked and scrubbed; she chopped wood and made fences; she taught her little children the only lessons they were ever to receive. Nor was she spared the final sorrow, when in an agony of despair, she held a curly-haired baby while he breathed his last, because ;\ere was no skilled ministering hand to ease his pain. And one day the brave English heart that had pineu for a grey familiar London, could beat no longer, and Clemency-Jane died, grieving that she must leave her little ones to face alone the endless toil and hardship and sorrow, and the isolation of that life behind the hills.

Sixty-four y~ars age—but to-day there lives a second Clem, twelve years of age, whose life with her parents on a loinote North Auckland farmlet is as tragic, as unbelievable in its hardship and isolation as was the life of her great-grandmother—the little pioneer—Clemency-Jane.

NOTE For obviou» reasons we have used a fictitious name, but the counterpart of ClemencyJane is a real live flesh and blood girl living in Nsrth Auckland. Peter Tan's letter to-day tells of other cases that are almost identical. These ar3 the children on whose behalf we are conducting

the present drive for 'funds.