Of all her offspring, Noeleen seems to have been the one who inherited her mother’s combination of inner strength and outgoing attractiveness. She had been born Mary Noeleen Rawstron on 15 October 1918, in Gisborne. A spirited girl, she was also blessed with striking good looks. By the time she had reached her teenage years, she had become an object of admiration for many of the area’s menfolk.
Noeleen’s first serious boyfriend was Jimmy Collier, a handsome Maori farm labourer who lived in Tokomaru Bay. The pair conducted their courtship far from the prying eyes of the local community, in the shadow of Mount Hikurangi and the parched hills overlooking the town. Their idyll was short-lived, however. Soon Noeleen had fallen pregnant. She gave birth to a son in 1938, naming him James Patrick after his father. If she had hoped the child would cement their relationship, she had been mistaken. Jimmy seemed frightened by the responsibility and the speed at which matters had progressed. Noeleen was left to raise Jimmy junior, or Ninna as he was nicknamed, at home with her mother. As Jimmy junior grew into a young boy, his father became less and less an influence in his life. By 1940 Collier had moved to Gisborne where he married another woman. Noeleen found the desertion hard to bear.
‘Noeleen couldn’t understand what Jimmy was doing with her,’ recalled a friend, Ira Haig, a schoolteacher in the town. ‘She knew she was much better looking than this girl and couldn’t accept his rejection.’
In the aftermath of Collier’s disappearance, Noeleen cast her eye around the male population for a man capable of bringing her new happiness. Three years after Collier left Tokomaru Bay, she thought she had found him.
As World War II brought Europe’s economy to a standstill, Tokomaru Bay found itself entering one of the most prosperous periods in its history. With the rest of the world in desperate need of wool and mutton, the freezing factory was at full capacity. More than 2,000 men poured into the area to work, among them a twenty-five-year-old Maori butcher, Tieki ‘Jack’ Wawatai.
Jack had travelled down to Tokomaru from the village of Rangitukia, sixty miles to the north along the Pacific coast. As a Maori he could not be conscripted into the ANZAC forces now being dispatched by the New Zealand government. Instead, with little work available on the farms in his area, he headed south to the freezing factory where his skills with a knife had brought him work in previous seasons. Not for the first time in his life, Jack Wawatai arrived in Tokomaru in need of money. Back in Rangitukia a wife and a large family were depending on him.
Jack had been born and raised in Rangitukia. His father had died there when he was just thirteen. When his mother remarried he had been taken in by the community’s Anglican minister, the Reverend Poihipi Kohere. Jack worked on the minister’s farm where he made an instant impression on his employer’s daughter, Apo. In November 1937, twenty-year-old Jack and eighteen-year-old Apo were married in the Reverend Kohere’s home. By 1943 they had four children.
Jack was a good-looking man with piercing eyes and an engaging, happy-go-lucky personality. ‘He could charm the birds from the trees,’ said his schoolteacher wife. Blessed with a fine singing voice, his renditions of traditional Maori songs and Mario Lanza arias would often drift towards the farmhouse. ‘I would hear him singing to the cows in the field in the middle of the night,’ smiled Apo. In Tokomaru Bay, Jack whiled away the long evenings singing with a group of other, mostly Maori, men in a shop near the Rawstrons’ home.
He had been introduced to the impromptu singalongs by Ira Haig, a friend of his family for years. ‘At first he told me he couldn’t go. He was married and these meetings were for single men only,’ said Ira. ‘But he loved to sing, he really did, and in the end he went. I took him there.’ By 1943 Noeleen had landed herself a job working as a waitress in the meat works’ canteen. It was there she first set her eye on the handsome newcomer. He reciprocated her interest and soon they were seeing each other discreetly. According to her sister, Donny, Noeleen may have assumed Jack was unmarried when she met him. If she had suspicions, they would have been deepened by his regular disappearance at weekends to return to Rangitukia and his family.
Whatever the truth, Noeleen felt the cut of her mother’s Irish temper when Thelma found out what her daughter was up to. ‘My mother kicked up a hell of a fuss,’ recalled Donny. ‘She didn’t like Jack. One, because he was Maori – she didn’t like the Maoris even though she lived surrounded by them – and two, because he was married.’
Disapproval may have been exactly what Thelma’s most headstrong daughter was looking for, however. ‘I saw them walking around town one Sunday afternoon and once I saw them at the pub. I spoke to Noeleen about it and I told her she should stop seeing Jack,’ said Donny. ‘But she told me it was none of my business. She had a strong will.’
Jack’s wife Apo had suspected nothing of her husband’s infidelity, even when he returned with little of his wages left. She put his shortage of money down to his weakness for drinking and gambling on a game called ‘two up’. ‘Jack was terrible with money,’ she lamented. Soon, however, news of his relationship with another woman found its way back to the farm via relations in Tokomaru Bay. While her father, an introverted man, bottled up his fury, Apo packed her bags and headed south to confront her husband. ‘It was a hell of a shock. I hadn’t expected it,’ she said.
When Noeleen got wind of Jack’s wife’s imminent arrival she prepared for the worst. ‘She thought she was coming to knock her block off,’ said Donny, to whom she confided news of the crisis. ‘Maybe Jack warned her because Noeleen stayed well out of the way all weekend.’
Instead, however, Apo maintained a dignified silence. She moved in with Jack in Waima and let him know she intended staying until their marriage was once more on an even keel. When she eventually saw Noeleen on the street she simply ignored her. ‘I couldn’t help but pass Noeleen by – but I don’t think I ever spoke to her,’ she recalled.
Apo treated her husband’s contrition with the scepticism it deserved. ‘He was a naughty boy. Jack said he was sorry and wouldn’t do it again.’ In years to come Jack would confirm her suspicions by straying once more, this time for good. Yet by the end of the freezing season of 1943 the couple were able to make the journey back to Rangitukia with their marriage intact.
Unable to see or speak to Jack, Noeleen was powerless as the latest man in her life left Tokomaru Bay. Her pain was compounded by the fact that he did so oblivious to the reality she was left to face alone. She was pregnant once more.
During the early months of morning sickness, Noeleen managed to keep the news to herself. ‘We never knew,’ said her sister Donny. ‘She never told me or anyone else.’
If she had a confidante, it was probably a woman from outside Tokomaru Bay and her family circle, Kura Beale, stepdaughter of the area’s richest landowner, A.B. Williams, for whom Noeleen had worked as a cleaner in nearby Te Puia Springs. According to some, Kura Beale had herself fallen pregnant in unfortunate circumstances and had, apparently, given her child away for adoption. As Noeleen’s condition became obvious, however, it seems her mother realised what had happened and was instrumental in Noeleen’s decision to leave Tokomaru Bay. Noeleen decided to head for Gisborne, a town large enough and far away enough for her to have her baby in relative peace. When she left, her mother had prepared a cover story for her. ‘I remember my mother telling me that Noeleen had gone away to work for a while,’ said Donny.
The unhappiness she must have endured during the final weeks of her pregnancy can only be imagined. Her misery came to an end at the maternity annexe of the Cook Hospital, on 6 March, when she gave birth to a baby girl. She named the child Claire Mary Teresa Rawstron.
With Jack Wawatai once more reunited with his family and unlikely to have been aware of the birth, Noeleen had no choice but to leave the name of the girl’s father blank on the birth certificate. Forced to remain in Gisborne and without an income, however, she could