CHILDHOOD HEROES Wrestlers Lofty Blomfield and Earl McCready were two of Dorothy McCaw’s heroes when she was growing up in Whare Flat. The area was relatively isolated and the family did not have much money. However, they had a strong feeling of togetherness on Saturday nights when they all gathered around the radio to hear the commentary of wrestling matches. “It was the highlight of the week,” she says. “We all knew the different holds. One of the wrestlers had a particular kick. When he used it, that was the end of the other wrestler.” Going to the movies on Saturday was another treat. Mrs McCaw remembers biking eight miles along unsealed roads from Whare Flat to Mosgiel to go to the movies. “It cost about sixpence to get in and I remember a boyfriend from high school was the lolly boy at the theatre so naturally I kept in with him!” she says. Her favourite movie stars of the time were Jeanette McDonald and Nelson Eddy. In one movie the latter was resplendent in the red uniform of the Canadian Mounties. “He made me drool,” Dorothy McCaw laughs. She says the pair’s singing and acting were excellent or so she thought, as she was growing up. “I watched one of their films recently and hooted with laughter. Their acting was so amateurish!” Other movies helped shape a lifelong interest in cinema: “The Tarzan movies were a real roof-raiser. We’d go home and try swinging through the trees. “And I drooled over the big musicals when they were first introduced.” Mrs McCaw was born in Dunedin and attended Musselburgh School for a year. She has a vivid memory of her parents and neighbours talking about the death and destruction of the 1931 Napier earthquake. Her father, an electrician at the Waipori Power Station, moved to a job in Oturehua when she was six years old. The family went to live at Ophir. The oldest of six children, Dorothy McCaw remembers the extremely cold winters in Ophir when she and her sister used to skate on the icy footpaths to school. The township provided an interesting interlude in her life: “We lived next to the butcher’s shop. He always seemed to have his copper boiling saveloys or other meat. “There was an old man who lived by himself and on our way home from school we used to go into his house. He’d give us fresh bread and butter. But instead of spreading it thinly he’d cut a slice off the pound of butter. I don’t think I’ve ever tasted anything as good as that.” One adventurous after-school pastime was playing around the town reservoir, which was surrounded by a path. “We’d run around the path. I guess we were lucky we never fell in,” Mrs McCaw reflects. Her Ophir days ended when her mother’s health started to fail and she and her sister were sent to Mataura to stay with an aunt. While they were living there her parents shifted to Whare Flat where her father was in charge of the pumping station. The family lived in a house on the banks of the Silver Stream: “It used to flood very easily in the winter and was often close to flooding our home.” Like thousands of New Zealanders, Dorothy McCaw’s parents had gone through the Great Depression and did not have much money. “We always had bare floors in our house. When it came to washing we’d get out the washboard to scrub the clothes, then boil them in a copper. They would then be rinsed by hand and if they were whites they would be put in a tub with Reckitt’s Blue. My mother made her own soap and it was a special day when we got a hand wringer because before that we used to wring the clothes by hand.” The family did not have a car so Mrs McCaw’s father used to bike into Mosgiel on Saturdays to get household goods. However, Wilson’s Grocery Store in Mosgiel delivered to Whare Flat on Thursdays and a butcher called from time to time. Getting milk was a problem. The family was not allowed to keep a cow so Mrs McCaw’s mother used to mix water with tins of sweetened condensed milk. That combined with the lack of a dentist nearby meant the children’s teeth suffered. Whare Flat School had 12 pupils and very good sole charge teachers. Because it was an isolated community the pupils did not get the usual childhood diseases at the usual time. Dorothy McCaw says she did not get the measles until she was a 13-year-old high school pupil. Life was far from dismal for the children of Whare Flat. Many lived close to the bush and a favourite Saturday occupation was going up the bush with a bag of potatoes and salt. “We’d light a fire and cook the potatoes in the ashes. We’d be away all day,” Mrs McCaw remembers. She says it was a very safe childhood: “We never came to any harm. People used to picnic out there and we’d see pig hunters in the bush. “There were wild pigs all around and it was not unusual for Dad to shoot pigs not far from the house. “We kept hens but the weasels and stoats used to get them. And my father had a very good vegetable garden.” When she was 10, Dorothy McCaw’s mother became seriously ill and had to go into hospital. The eldest child was left to look after the rest of the family. “I had to look after my sister and brothers and do all the housework but it was not unusual for kids to do that in those days. There are still children doing that today,” she says. After her mother was discharged from hospital she went to a convalescent home. She was away from her own home for three months. During that time her eldest child saw her just once – and then she had to get special permission. She says it ironic that she was old enough to look after the rest of the family but not old enough to visit her sick mother. The big snow of 1939 saw Dorothy McCaw, her sister and brothers stranded at Whare Flat. “My uncle who was about 32, was a boxer and he died after a blow to the heart so my parents were in Dunedin at the time the snow started,” she explains. Her parents were frantic about leaving six children on their own but Dorothy McCaw remembers the incident as a big adventure. “We had lots of fun. We made sledges out of corrugated iron and went sledging at the back of the house.” Meanwhile, her parents struck a problem. They could not bury her uncle because they could not get out to the cemetery. Dorothy McCaw was in her first year at Mosgiel District High School when World War Two broke out. Her father, a keen radio listener, kept the family informed of the developments. The war also had a direct impact on her: “A lot of young men I knew were killed in the war – my best friend at Whare Flat, teachers, the man who delivered our groceries, my husband’s sister’s fiancé. It got to the stage where it seemed we had a world full of women without partners.” To get to high school she had to bike eight miles along a gravel road from Whare Flat to Mosgiel and make the return journey at the end of the school day. Wet weather played havoc with her clothes on her ride to school. “I can remember trying to dry my clothes by ironing them when I got to Mosgiel. Once I tried ironing the collar of my shirt while I was still wearing it and I burnt my neck. I can still see the mark it left.” Later, she boarded with relatives in Mosgiel. In the second term of her fifth form year, the pressure went on for her to leave school. “My sister had already left, a brother needed to go to high school and my parents couldn’t afford to have me at school any longer.” Dorothy McCaw went to work at the Mosgiel Woollen Mills. It was wartime and practically everything which was made, was in khaki. Once again she biked to and from Whare Flat. It was a tough life because the mill began work early and did not finish until 6pm. By that time she was tired. She had no alternative but to bike home on unlit roads, hoping the carbide lamp on her bicycle would last the journey. Dorothy McCaw liked science at school and hoped to work in a laboratory. She left the mill when she found a job in a factory laboratory in Dunedin. After a year in Dunedin she decided to go back to the Mosgiel mill where she was trained as a weaver. War had finished and she was kept busy weaving double-sided rugs which were presented to servicemen returning to Mosgiel. At 16 Dorothy McCaw used to go to Night Tech in Dunedin. That meant catching a train from Mosgiel. “There were long carriages on either side. Quite a group of us used to go to Night Tech and would sit on one side. My future husband, Neil and his friends used to get on at Abbotsford. I didn’t think about going out with him then but it didn’t take long before we did.” Neil McCaw was a carpenter who knocked off work at 4.30pm He was so smittened by Dorothy he would take the train to Abbotsford after work, get on his bike and cycle over Signal Hill. He would be outside the mill at 6pm when Dorothy finished her workday. He biked with her to her home in Whare Flat, then rode back to his own home in Abbotsford. Neil and Dorothy McCaw were married in 1948. It was the end of her working career.“When the boss knew I was getting married he told me I had to leave because he didn’t employ married women,” she recalls. Mrs McCaw is co-founder of Carers New Zealand, an organisation that supports unpaid carers. While she believes looking after the rest of the family at the tender age of 10 robbed her of her childhood, she says being a carer in childhood either makes people strong and independent or sends them in the wrong direction. Caring for her parents and siblings made Dorothy McCaw strong and independent. This item from the Otago Age Concern Publication Memories are Made of This is used with permission Page 1