Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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dreadfully absent-minded about his clothes. Of course we couldn’t afford to
lose clothes because we had no money. I came to retrieve something from the
lost property box and I saw Ingrid in the playground but I went straight to where
I needed to go, and I didn’t acknowledge her because I didn’t want to embarrass
her. 233
Vincent’s other sister, Marianne, did not feel embarrassed by her mother. She states:
“We knitted differently, we warmed the butter differently, salted the butter differently.
I was quite proud of her”. 234 Ingrid Ward’s view of her mother was somewhat different
from her sister’s:
With my mother, half her identity was somewhere else and she was very
definitely from another country and very definitely different from other people
[…]. It wasn’t just that she was culturally different, my mother did different
things from other mothers at this time. She did not believe in having her cake
tins full and she said so, whereas other farmers’ wives filled their cake tins […].
And if we lost things, like lost clothes, she would come to school and look for
them, which other mothers didn’t.
In contrast to her sister, Ingrid did find her mother’s behaviour embarrassing in some
respects: “She was actually a lot more - I don’t know whether assertive is the word - but
she was just a lot more definite than a lot of other mothers that I knew, who were sort of
kindly farmers’ wives who cooked large amounts of food […] and didn’t assert
themselves. They were sort of plump and bustling and mum wasn’t any of those things.
And she had a fair sense of the rights of women too”. 235
In view of her attitudes towards women’s rights, Judy had further difficulties adjusting
to the somewhat rigid attitudes towards men’s and women’s roles at that time in New
Zealand. Ingrid comments that her father “was a bit of a perfectionist” and that he
regarded the farm as ‘his farm’. “Mum would look after the children and dad would
look after the farm and I think she felt a bit excluded from decision-making. And she
had no independent income. Dad was kind, […] he was benevolent, you know, it was a
kind of benevolent paternalistic kind of thing”. She adds: “Dad would have said yes to
233 Lynette Read, interview with Judy Ward, 15 April, 1999.
234 Lynette Read, interview with Marianne Chandler, 1 October 1999.
235 Lynette Read, interview with Ingrid Ward, 15 April 1999.