Great-aunt Joan, and why I’m grateful for NZ’s Covid response

I’m writing this on Joan Bridgeman’s birthday, December 2. It is the first one she has missed in 105 years. My father’s mother’s sister, she died in New Plymouth in August with, as she would want me to say, all her marbles.

She was the irreplaceable matriarch of our extended family – twinkly, serene, logical, warm, with crisp memories going back a century; a former maths and English teacher with an insatiable interest in the world and the welfare of everyone in it.

Well, nearly everyone. She hated Trump. ‘‘You can dig a hole and put him in it. And put the lid on.’’

This came during our last conversation in February; her slight frame, surrounded by stacks of books and cryptic crosswords, convulsed with indignation. As usual, she was in sparkling form, with ideas, jokes, memories, questions, and laser-sharp literary opinions about everything from poetry to David Attenborough.

A big Kim Hill fan (‘‘the radio is your university!’’), she was keen to learn te reo; although when I left, we both knew I would never see her again – I lived in Auckland, and she lived in New Plymouth, and she was terminally ill, although she didn’t look a day over 85.

After she died, I thought about a life bookended by global catastrophe. Joan had lived through two world wars, two pandemics and a Great Depression. I’m not sure if all of this made her stronger and more unflappable, although it might have led to her zeal for vegetable gardening. A mother of six, she once told me the two greatest inventions of the 20th century were the washing machine and the vacuum cleaner.

This remarkable human was delivered, in 1916, by a district nurse in Whangamō mona, during the first great global disaster of her life. A horse-drawn gig plodded mother and daughter to their farmhouse 9km away, in a longvanished township in the spectacular rumpled hill country of inland Taranaki.

All that is left of Kō huratahi is a hall surrounded by paddocks, and a granite obelisk big enough to take 41 names. Of the 131 young men from this district who enlisted in World War I, 40 never made it back. Most were blown to bits on the Western Front while Joan was learning to walk – the 41st died in Auckland of the flu in 1918.

Baby Joan was the third daughter of a household that would soon number eight – mother Henrietta, father Charlie, five children, and Henrietta’s mother (also named Henrietta).

Joan told me, last summer, that she had been thinking about her grandmother, and wished she had asked her more about her life. This is the kind of thing we all think when our grandparents die. But it seemed especially poignant in a dying person. It also made me feel, giddily, as if I was standing on the edge of a yawning precipice of time – Henrietta senior was born in 1846.

Joan was 5 when the World War I memorial was unveiled, and 11 when her father, the farmer proprietor of the Kō huratahi cheese factory, bought a car – a Ford. ‘‘You had to crank it round and round and round, and even then, it might not start.’’

Breakdowns were so common that travellers telegraphed – ‘‘Arrived safely’’ – when they got to their destination. But soon after the family car swept into the valley, so did the Depression.

The memory was still painful, 90 years later. ‘‘It was . . . monstrous,’’ Joan told me. ‘‘People worked so hard, and got nothing. There was no money. It . . . disappeared. We just had to make do.’’

As a teenager, that meant making your undies out of salt sacks and getting a job instead of going to high school. Education cost too much, of the stuff no-one had or could earn, no matter how hard they tried.

Joan needed a scholarship to get to high school in Stratford – and another one, at 18, to go to Victoria University. She won them both, supported in her labours by her parents – it was important to Charlie that his daughters were well-educated. His death, in 1938, hit her hard.

And then a year later came the second world war of Joan’s life.

‘‘I can remember when I first heard Hitler’s name. Before the war.’’ At the time, she thought Hitler was too grotesque to amount to anything.

‘‘He promised people so many things he could never deliver. He did give them jobs. But by the time everyone realised what was happening, it was too late.

‘‘When [the war] came, of course, we were afraid. We thought we were going to be bombed!’’

University friends left to join the army, and some never came back. Her younger brother Ken, a pilot in the RNZAF, survived the war by millimetres – after a bombing raid, he found a flak hole in his seat a whisper from his leg.

Joan retired in 1981. Fourteen years later, her husband Leo suffered a stroke and needed intensive home care. In 2001, she was widowed. Joan faced the tragedies of her life – she outlived three of her children – with strength and grace.

If Joan had died at the age of 80, as Rex Warwood did so tragically last week, it would have sliced a quarter of a century from her life – years of fun and busyness, years as the family rock, years meeting grandchildren and greatgrandchildren who will always remember her.

If New Zealand’s Covid response had been different, I might never have had that last, effervescent conversation with Joan. New Zealand’s death rate is, so far, minuscule by international standards, and for that, I am not only grateful – I am incredulous.

Life, as Joan told me, doesn’t always go the way you expect it to. As a motto for a pandemic, that’s good enough for me.

A mother of six, she once told me the two greatest inventions of the 20th century were the washing machine and the vacuum cleaner.

PHOTO: KEN DOWNIE