Nell
by Penelope Todd
“This above all: to thine own self be true / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
Time-serving windbag though Polonius is generally accounted, it must be conceded that this advice to his son offers a guide to living a life of integrity, and Penelope Todd has been quick to adopt the advice in her memorial to her grandmother. Memoir, biography and novel mixed, the life of the woman born Eleanor Preston but known all her life as ‘Nell’ is a study in that very quality.
A product of the times in her upbringing, Nell was born in 1897 at the high tide of Empire, the year of the Queen-Emperor’s Diamond Jubilee. As a child of empire, she imbibed the attitudes and mores of her times as readily as she absorbed the primal tastes, feels and scents of plants, the farm and the sprawling land under the vast skies of the South Island, and these attitudes sustained her as she watched the progressive crumbling of the world of her birthright under the impetus of outside events.
She was a maid of 20 when Passchendaele tore her generation of young men apart; a young mother of 30 at the onset of the Great Depression; 40 at the onset of another war that occurred because the ‘War to end War’ had signally failed to do so; 50 as a New Elizabethan and 60 at the advent of the Swinging Sixties. However the world around her of which she was so much a part altered or convulsed, Nell remained staunchly high-principled, self-aware, self-possessed and happy in her own skin, buoyed and sustained by the behaviours and principles she learned as a daughter of the Empire at its apotheosis.
This went beyond the public into the private life also. Today, when the term ‘colonist’ is more often an epithet than a description, it is instructive to consider the type of life such people led. Todd spares no effort in showing the reader just how much strength, self-sufficiency and stiff upper lip were called for not only to live in a wattle-and-daub cottage through several Maniototo winters but to adapt to marriage, miscarriage, childbirth and supplying indispensable farm labour along the way. Such self-sufficiency was essential in a land that was even more empty than the North Island and Todd shows us, all the way through the work, that Nell’s cares were often worsened or at the least added to, by pressure from the needs, deeds or wishes of others.
From a husband, for example who, although not consciously cruel nor misogynistic, was nevertheless a man of his times and upbringing with expectations to suit. This is best shown in the early awareness of a nine-year-old Nell that ‘Each time visitors come, she notices afresh that men and boys are lords, and that women and girls look after them.’ In her early twenties, Nell was the victim of her own mother’s need for companionship and assistance to the extent of giving up a promising career as a nurse. Again, thirty years later her husband’s decision in the face of the post-war economic slump to sell the farm that had been purchased with her ‘dowry’ and into which they had poured blood, sweat and tears is presented as a fait accompli which Nell had little choice but to accept.
Through such major blows, though, as well as the multitude of setbacks present in an age of muscle rather than machine, ever and anon Nell’s ability to roll with the punches was founded upon an inner strength that came from knowing whom and what she was as a sentient, thinking being; a product of her times and situation no less than was her husband. Todd demonstrates this by recounting how a new and young doctor rather sniffily dismissed the “old wives remedies of . . . all you intractably opinionated women . . .until you need actual medical care, actual scientific advice” in a manner that showed how little he knew of the life situations and realities facing frontier women often far from “actual medical care” in an empty land.
Only one event in a long life came close to breaking this amazing woman, and for the sake of Penelope Todd’s well-told story, this reviewer has no intention of revealing it, as to do so would deprive the reader of the impact which the event and its aftermath had on me.
‘Nell’ is a deceptively simple story of hard work and simple pleasures; of a generation who ‘got on with it’ through thick and thin; of the people who, in a variety of ways, made New Zealand the place that it is and who were responsible for my abiding conviction that History is the story of ordinary people frequently doing extraordinary things. Anyone interested in New Zealand’s story needs to read Penelope Todd’s tribute to her grandmother.
by Penelope Todd
“This above all: to thine own self be true / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
Time-serving windbag though Polonius is generally accounted, it must be conceded that this advice to his son offers a guide to living a life of integrity, and Penelope Todd has been quick to adopt the advice in her memorial to her grandmother. Memoir, biography and novel mixed, the life of the woman born Eleanor Preston but known all her life as ‘Nell’ is a study in that very quality.
A product of the times in her upbringing, Nell was born in 1897 at the high tide of Empire, the year of the Queen-Emperor’s Diamond Jubilee. As a child of empire, she imbibed the attitudes and mores of her times as readily as she absorbed the primal tastes, feels and scents of plants, the farm and the sprawling land under the vast skies of the South Island, and these attitudes sustained her as she watched the progressive crumbling of the world of her birthright under the impetus of outside events.
She was a maid of 20 when Passchendaele tore her generation of young men apart; a young mother of 30 at the onset of the Great Depression; 40 at the onset of another war that occurred because the ‘War to end War’ had signally failed to do so; 50 as a New Elizabethan and 60 at the advent of the Swinging Sixties. However the world around her of which she was so much a part altered or convulsed, Nell remained staunchly high-principled, self-aware, self-possessed and happy in her own skin, buoyed and sustained by the behaviours and principles she learned as a daughter of the Empire at its apotheosis.
This went beyond the public into the private life also. Today, when the term ‘colonist’ is more often an epithet than a description, it is instructive to consider the type of life such people led. Todd spares no effort in showing the reader just how much strength, self-sufficiency and stiff upper lip were called for not only to live in a wattle-and-daub cottage through several Maniototo winters but to adapt to marriage, miscarriage, childbirth and supplying indispensable farm labour along the way. Such self-sufficiency was essential in a land that was even more empty than the North Island and Todd shows us, all the way through the work, that Nell’s cares were often worsened or at the least added to, by pressure from the needs, deeds or wishes of others.
From a husband, for example who, although not consciously cruel nor misogynistic, was nevertheless a man of his times and upbringing with expectations to suit. This is best shown in the early awareness of a nine-year-old Nell that ‘Each time visitors come, she notices afresh that men and boys are lords, and that women and girls look after them.’ In her early twenties, Nell was the victim of her own mother’s need for companionship and assistance to the extent of giving up a promising career as a nurse. Again, thirty years later her husband’s decision in the face of the post-war economic slump to sell the farm that had been purchased with her ‘dowry’ and into which they had poured blood, sweat and tears is presented as a fait accompli which Nell had little choice but to accept.
Through such major blows, though, as well as the multitude of setbacks present in an age of muscle rather than machine, ever and anon Nell’s ability to roll with the punches was founded upon an inner strength that came from knowing whom and what she was as a sentient, thinking being; a product of her times and situation no less than was her husband. Todd demonstrates this by recounting how a new and young doctor rather sniffily dismissed the “old wives remedies of . . . all you intractably opinionated women . . .until you need actual medical care, actual scientific advice” in a manner that showed how little he knew of the life situations and realities facing frontier women often far from “actual medical care” in an empty land.
Only one event in a long life came close to breaking this amazing woman, and for the sake of Penelope Todd’s well-told story, this reviewer has no intention of revealing it, as to do so would deprive the reader of the impact which the event and its aftermath had on me.
‘Nell’ is a deceptively simple story of hard work and simple pleasures; of a generation who ‘got on with it’ through thick and thin; of the people who, in a variety of ways, made New Zealand the place that it is and who were responsible for my abiding conviction that History is the story of ordinary people frequently doing extraordinary things. Anyone interested in New Zealand’s story needs to read Penelope Todd’s tribute to her grandmother.
Review by MJ Burr
Title: Nell
Author: Penelope Todd
Publisher: Cloud Ink Press
ISBN: Paperback 9781738594337, epub 9781738594344
RRP: $34.99
Available: Most bookshops; online from
Bateman Books, The Women's Bookshop, cloudink; e-book Amazon
Author: Penelope Todd
Publisher: Cloud Ink Press
ISBN: Paperback 9781738594337, epub 9781738594344
RRP: $34.99
Available: Most bookshops; online from
Bateman Books, The Women's Bookshop, cloudink; e-book Amazon
RSS Feed
