Stories of the Maori 1914

[Valles]

"Remember to stop by the yam-seller's for your mother on your way back!" Rangi's grandmother admonished as he pelted down the stairs past the kitchen to the upper street.

"I will!" he called back over his shoulder as he went out the door. It was February and the morning was already balmy and alive with the cries of frogs and birds and bugs and bats, winding down their dawn and nighttime songs. Rangi sprinted across the wooden walkway that connected the two sides of the upper street, ignoring the three-meter drop with the ease of familiarity.

Besides, he didn't have time to be scared of heights. He'd been the last for this morning's shower, after two of his sisters and four of the girl cousins, and there'd barely been time to get wet before he should have been out the door and waiting by the rail stop.

The three-section streetcar was just pulling up as he reached the crowd waiting for it. It was already half-full of burly men with jobs on the harbor or in the factories and schoolchildren with teachers to meet on the marae, the latter flowing around the former like a horde of squawking, squabbling ground parrots stuck in  apen with some particularly patient oxen. By the time the car reached the bridge it was full to bursting just from its route through the single neighborhood. Rangi had one brother, five sisters, and fourteen cousins counting only the ones living with the family in the tall house in the Blossoms. Parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles and siblings and cousins together filled the six story house that would have been an apartment building in another country.

The bridge that the streetcar had to cross was the second-longest span in Maoria, arcing over the mouth of the river where it emerged into the 'point' of the long, trumpet-shaped bay, and it arced high above the water to leave room for ships to steam upstream. The cars emerged from behind a looming mill (covered in paitners supsended against its walls by ropes as they worke don this month's mural - another take on the virtues of large families, it looked like - so much duller than the ones about reclaiming the homelands) to see the entire city of Pukeroa spread out around them.

The harbor was loweest, with the spikes of its cranes rising up above docks and shipyards, then the great square barn-shapes of the factories and mills around their borad access roads and private rail spurs. West of the harbor, on the other side of the great birdge, soared the towers of the commercial districts on either side of the river, sleek glass and tile spires of commercial buildings and the blockier shapes of the worker dormitories that the government built to cater to workmen from other parts, whose families had no houses in the residential districts like the Blossoms, that filled out around the city center like a foam of unplanned star-centered bubbles.

The streetcar finished crossing the swaying suspension bridge and turned west, clunking onto the busy rail that ran along the riverside. As usual in the mronings, there was a cool breeze off the harbor, smelling of salt, coal, and seaweed, and the shade trees planted along the narrow park at riverside rustled as it brushed their long, hairlike branchlets. Most of the workmen climbed off at that point, but there were still a few adults revealed now that their bulk was out of the way - businessmen whose families weren't well enough off to live in the exclusive western districts, and teachers bound for the same place as their students.

The streetcar stopped at last at the gates of Whanganui's marae, letting the children who'd crowded it race down the stairs to spill out into the tide of students flooding out onto the grassy square. At thirteen Rangi was an older student, and picked his way across the field towards where his teacher had hooked the class badge to the top of her stick so that her students could identify which of the gathering knots to join.

"All right, children," she said when all of her students had arrived not too far beyond the appointed time, "You know that this is going to be our last day together before your final tests, so I'm happy to announce that I've got good news for those of you that like machines." That was most of them, since there class was one of those picked for that. "Today we'll be visiting the workshop of the Pukeroa Racing Team."

For a moment there was silence, and then their teacher was laughing and trying to make herself heard over an explosion of excitement. Eventually she gave up on doing it politely and resorted to shouting. "PIPE DOWN!"

That worked, and most of Rangi's classmates where looking as embarrassed as he felt at having to be yelled at like little children rather than the near adults that they were accustomed to think of themselves as.

"Everyone has their books?" Teacher asked, starting the litany.

They opened their bags and checked that they did. No one groaned, and Rangi had his own math and history and reader and workbook.

"Your pencils and abaci?"

Those were present, too, along with the short knife to sharpen the former.

"Your lunch or the money for it?"

A fresh-baked roll from his mother's oven and a yam stuffed with sausage and peppers, each seperately wrapped in wax paper inside a metal tin that had been his father's until last New Year.

"Your student papers?"

Those were folded in the special canvas and brass case in his pocket.

"Counted each other so we're not missing anyone?"

Rangi did, and they weren't.

"All right, then. We want the Three Coconut line - this way!" Their teacher led the way and her dozen-plus-two students followed, threading their way across the marae and out to the head of the line that led to the Three Coconuts, the neighborhood that lay on and around one of the hills that pushed into the city and loomed over the valley. This one was named for the three smooth faces of rock that pushed through the soil that laid thin over the basalt bones of the area.

The racing team's workshop was on the edge of the district, in the area of shops and small warehouses where the residential neighborhood blended into the industrial regions below. The class climbed off  the tram and made their way down the giant-sized stairsteps that the upper street made there, and Rangi hoped for his own part that they'd catch one of the workmen's commuter lines back rather than climbing the hill back to the stop they'd arrived at in the summer afternoon heat.

When they got to the work shop they found a big, echoing brick building full of metalworking tools and the parts to make half a dozen motor cars. There were two mostly finished looking ones lurking just inside the big square doors, and the naked frame of a third lay on a lift behind them being matched to its boiler and engine.

[Borys]

Luverly!

[maddox]

A steam car entering the Desert Race?  Lovely.

Valles, I like.

[The Rock Doctor]

Good story, Valles.

I see Maoria's the latest to get on the "Have more babies" train...

[Korpen]

Good story, Valles.

I see Maoria's the latest to get on the "Have more babies" train...

Something that strain their economy...

[Blooded]

Great Story!

I believe that is my favorite to date. I can only hope to write as well. Good Job!

[Valles]

Thank you, everyone. I'd meant to go on for a bit longer, with the class taking a ride towards the end of the day after helping out hands-on so that the drivers could flirt with their teacher... but it kinda stalled, so I went with what I had.

So you never got the chance to realize that Maori automobiles are big like the proverbial Chrysler, or that their engines are unconcerned with the puny limits of the internal combustion techs, or get a lecture on why simpler mechanisms are better, or that the government tends to spend most of its transportation kanatara on the railways, so the roads are... kinda terrible.

But you did see how the Maori lay out their cities and how they live and how they usually get around, as well as getting a look at a typical part of their educational system and part of their propaganda machine.