How my mother ended up in New Zealand

A couple of weeks ago a customer came into the library whose wife is Clare Sutton, who as a little girl was looked after by my mother as her nanny. Yesterday I met Clare for lunch in the library cafe and she told me what she remembered of Meme, and what she had been told about her . I also spoke to Rhoda in 1995 at her home in Tohunga Crescent Parnell and she gave me a lovely photo of Mum and Clare on the beach at Cannes where they had gone for a holiday.
In March 1937 they were living in a hotel in the Hague where they had a bedroom and a sitting room. Arnold had got a job as a paleontologist with Shell and my mother was a maid in the hotel. Accomodation had been hard to find so Arnold, Rhoda and baby Clare stayed in the hotel. One evening they wanted to go out and applied to an agency for a children's nurse to look after 3 month old Clare and they were sent a woman who appeared with a swastika emblem on her coat . Rhoda was horrified and did not want a Nazi looking after her child.

My mother was familiar with the family when she took meals to the room on a tray and was very fond of Clare whom she referred to as Die Goldische. She offered to, or was asked, if she would look after Clare which she did and the arrangement continued.
Later Arnold got a job in Swiztzerland near the French border and they asked my mother if she would like to go with them and be their children's nurse. Anna, their second child was born round this time. They lived over the border in France in the Haut Savoie at Le Crest Davaulx near Annecy and Clare was brought up speaking English , French and German. When they travelled to Switzerland, Meme had to crouch down and hide as she didnt have the relevant papers. In the end she got permission.

In Wintger 1938/39 Arnold applied for a job with the NZ Geological Survey and was interviewed successfully at the NZ High Commission for the job in London. Rhoda had returned to her family in Manchester to say goodbye and my mother did the same arriving in Manchester herself soon after. Her father was still alive, and her younger sister and brother Anton, who died in the war Rhoda's mother reported that Clare saw her first and reported to the rest of the family "Meme est ici". They had the usual long voyage out to and spent the first little time at the Midland Hotel, where they found out to their consternation and amazement that children were not served in the dining room. They later got there own house and the children's bedroom was connected to Meme's who looked after them in the night etc. Arnold was employed in drawing maps in the Dannevirke area and they spent several months during summer camped in that area. Charles Fleming was there too. Martin Te Ponga was one of the field hands who were very interested in my mother. She later went out with the Lower Hutt photographer Andrew , a well-known Wellington family of the time.

After this period my mother met my father Sydney Alan Gabb and they got married at St Mary of the Angels in Wellington, November 1942. According to Rhoda it was a dreadful service. It was a weekday I think and she wore a navy suit . Arnold gave her away and they had a celebratory lunch at the Midland, just down the hill.


During the war there was the usual anti-German and anti-Jewish feeling with one of the Germans at the embasssy telling someone the Lillie's would be first on the hit list. My mother had to report to the police once a week. I looked up her file in the National Archives several years ago and she was not considered a risk at all, having assured the powers that be that she was not interested in politics at all.

I was born in October 1943 and some time after that the family shifted to Dunedin where we lived at St Clair, shifting to Aucland in 1957. In 1953 my parents went to Germany to see mum's sister Anne-Marie. Her father had died after the war from malnutrition. My parents had sent food parcels for many years - rolled oats, cocoa and the like. My aunt told me they looked forward to drinking this wonderful cocoa once a week on Fridays.

We girls went to boarding school at Villa Maria in Christchurch. Myparents sent big parcels of lovely toys - roller skates, brightly coloured balls I remember but it doid not compensate for the austgerity of boarding school life of the time. Our grandparents lived at North Beach and we did visit them on a Sunday occasionally. They had their golden wedding anniversary that year and we were allowed an extra visit. At the end of the school year we returned home to Dunedin and life continued uneventfully for a year or so until mymother became ill with a "spot on the lung" and had a big operation and recuperation at Waikari Hospital. We had a second period of boarding school, but that is another story.
To be continued.