Sister Anne Keegan: God Has Been Good To Me

Born of good English and Irish stock, Sister Anne Keegan's story begins in New Plymouth in 1911, but it's the memories of farming life and creative ways that saw her family survive the Depression years that perhaps stick out the most.

In the warm sunroom of the Mission Home, New Plymouth, she speaks easily and full of gentle grace about times long ago, when her name was Mary, and her nickname Molly. "My father, John, was the only one of his family born in New Zealand. There were 11 of us children and I was the half-way line" she says. "My father was on the railway in New Plymouth and we had a nice home. Then my father was crushed between two railway trucks. I would have been about three or four, just a child. He survived, but he couldn't go back to work on the railway anymore. That's when my mother and father decided to go out onto a farm."

The Keegan’s began a new life, sharemilking on Hastings Road near Kaponga. From there they moved onto leased land at Waingongoro, close to the mountain on the Stratford side. "We went to the farm when I was five or six" Anne recalls. "It was a beautiful farm. We bounded the mountain reserve and at the back was the Pātea River which ran right up to the mountain house. I had just started school. I think I went for one day. There was a school up there too with around 17 pupils and a great teacher. Because she was German, they wouldn't give her a town school, so we were very lucky. She was musical too."

Though Anne's father John had always been a railway man, her mother Mabel had been born on a farm and knew about cattle and milking. "Her surname was Herbert" Anne says. "Her father was in the Māori Wars. He came out from Ireland around that time."

Life on the Waingongoro farm was wonderful, Anne says, despite being born with a condition that meant she couldn't walk. "I had bad feet, you see, and my eldest sister always looked after me. I was always spoilt because I couldn't run around like the others and play. She used to sit me up on the table where I could watch them all through the windows." Without a trace of self-pity she continues. "I didn't miss out on a thing. I was a spoilt girl. I've been spoilt all my life. My sister took wonderful care of me."

She vividly remembers the doctor coming one day when she was four or five, putting her to sleep with anaesthetic and “straightening my feet”. And she remembers her first pair of shoes at the age of 11 or 12. "My father took me to Hannah’s in Stratford to have my first pair of shoes made. It made a difference having shoes. I've never forgotten that day. I never thought about how they looked, those days, so long as I could run around. That started me off walking."

The Keegan’s lived in a big house already on the farm when they arrived. It had a welcoming entrance, big lawn, a veranda that wrapped around the outside walls and the mountain as a backdrop. The creeks used to run from the bush and form a river on the property, where the Keegan boys caught eels. "They used to go right into my brother's hand. He could tickle them. And rainbow trout, too. Dad used to catch those as well."

Because they lived so close to the mountain, logs smouldered in the Keegan grate all year round, and any child who woke in the night could go and warm his feet at the hearth. "We had a special room, a sitting room, with a piano, but we used to live in the living room, next to the kitchen."

Anne remembers cream cans and wagons, and how the children would all take baths in the washtub in the laundry after boiling up the copper - and fine country cooking. "My mother was a great cook. We had good neighbours. We used to climb up the trees and break the branches down. One of the most frightening things would be to be up in the tree and all the cows would be underneath, looking up!"

Even winter was lovely. "After a big snow storm, there was always a moonlight night the next night, and the neighbours would all get together, and there'd be a horse to pull the sledge uphill, and we'd all jump on it and slide down the hill in the snow! It was lovely in the snow. We had wonderful times - the Keegan’s, the Morriesey’s, the O'Sullivan’s, the Askew’s - all young people like ourselves."

But the Spanish Flu outbreak in 1918 took a personal toll. "I was the only one who got it," Anne says, "and I was lucky. It wasn't very heavy. But I couldn't touch any food. One afternoon, my mother came in and lay on my bed beside me - it's as clear as anything - and she said, 'I want you to eat something.' She'd made bread and milk and she gave it to me, spoon by spoon, and that was the first thing."

The day her father had to go to town left a lasting impression. "It was a terrible, terrible time. We lived up past the factory on Waingongoro Road. There were only three other families and we lived at the top. And I don't remember anyone going into town but one day, my father had to go in. So he got in the horse and gig and about 2 o'clock in the afternoon my mother said, 'That looks like your father coming home.' We could see the road. He came home all right, but when he got home he said, 'Keep away from me. Don't come near me!' And he threw everything off.

 "He told us that going into town, around Cardiff, different ones came running out of the houses and said, 'Can you please bring this back from the chemist shop!' So he went straight to the chemist shop and took the medicine back. It was a terrible time."

But it was the big economic slump of the 1930s, known as the Depression that made the most impact on all the Keegan lives. "We were out on the farm and different people we knew so well were just walking off their farms. Leaving. They had to walk into Stratford, eight miles away, to be helped."

From her memories, Anne paints a poignant picture of the Taylor family who were friends and neighbours, walking away from their now unaffordable farm, pushing two young children in a pram, a new-born babe in arms, and carrying a single suitcase of clothes.

As she watched, Mabel Keegan said, "I'm going into town to start up something, somewhere, some business where I can take the children." So the family moved into town where Anne's parents began managing the boarding house, and from there they moved across the road to run the Stratford Private Hotel.

As a waitress, Anne served Mr and Mrs Bolger (parents to Jim Bolger, ex-Prime Minister) their first meal in New Zealand. "That's how we got through the Depression" Anne says. "By running the hotel. My mother was a clever woman. A strong woman."

Anne and a sister slept in a bedroom off the kitchen and destitute folk who arrived in the middle of the night could knock on the kitchen window and be let in. "They were poor people" she says. "With nowhere to go, nothing to do."

John Keegan turned the empty area beneath the hotel into extra bedrooms and found further unused space out the back for another four or five beds. While the upstairs of the hotel held paying guests, those hit hard by unemployment and poverty were always given free food and a safe place to sleep. "I remember a particular couple, with a little child about nine months old, and the woman stayed for a long time" Anne says. "My mother kept her there, God bless her."

Perhaps John and Mabel Keegan were rewarded for their kindness. "My eldest brother and another brother were out at Waingongoro, to keep the farm. A man came to board with us and he told Dad to see a solicitor. Dad sold the lease and managed to get quite a bit for it."

When Anne was around 14, she decided to enter Stratford's Sisters of the Mission convent as her elder sister had done. Her mother, a strong, wise woman, told her she must wait until she was the same age as her sister was when she entered. "My sister became a nun when she was in her twenties. I wanted to give myself to God, and with my sister being a nun, I knew what it meant. I knew, entering the convent, I could do whatever he wanted me to do. I gave myself to God. God had been so good to me, I wanted to thank him."

So began a life of caring for the elderly and sick in Hamilton and Panmure before coming back to Taranaki. Going into the convent is a decision she's never regretted. "I entered the convent over 60 years ago" she says in 2005. "I'm now 95."

Before Anne went into the convent, her father took her on a long-cherished trip. "My father's family first settled in Whanganui. Because my father had lived in Whanganui, he said, 'You don't know Whanganui. We'll have a day there.'" It was a special day. Anne hadn't been with her father on her own before.

"We got on a train and went down and he showed me all over town. Took me up to the tower to look down on the houses. He was a good dad" she says fondly. "He used to say the rosary, out in the country, every night. We had swinging lamps. But on Sundays, we couldn't all get into town for Mass so Mum would send some of the children. My second brother used to drive the gig, with seats this way and seats that way, and about five of us used to go."

Today, she says, there are too many Keegan’s to count. "I've got hundreds of relations. Some of them pop in to see me and I have to ask, 'Now who would you be?'" Only yesterday, someone arrived out of the blue from Wellington to see her. "I'd never heard of him before" she grins.

In 2004, when she turned 94, Anne Keegan became a well-loved member of the Mission Rest Home community where an invalid sister resides. As she says wryly, "It's the first time I haven't looked after anyone!"

In the sunroom of the Mission Rest Home, where tomatoes grow in warm pots, she smiles, deep in thought. She doesn't want her photo taken: she's never been much into photos, she says.

Though she's lived through many harsh times in early Taranaki, her memories seem overlaid by a golden sense of good fortune. "I had a wonderful mother, really, didn't I? She was very strong, and after my father was crushed on the railway, she took responsibility for the family. Both she and my father were great at working for the family."

She smiles again. "Yes. God has been good to me." Sister Anne Keegan passed away in December 2009.