Friday, December 22, 2006

Some photos from 21.12.06


The Crowl 'kids': Ben, Libby, Abby, Stef and Dominic seated on their grandmother's favourite settee, which originally belonged to her grandfather, Thomas Joyce.
(Click on the photos for larger versions.)

Stef with Mykala




Louise, Ben and Jacob



Abby, Thomas and Steve




This is a photo of most the people who came back to our house after the funeral yesterday.
Front row: Luke Stewart, Mike Crowl, Louise Crowl, Stef Crowl, Mykala Stewart, Jenna Stewart, Libby Crowl, Israel Baker, Abby Crowl, Daphne Hannagan, Des Stokes.

Back group: Steve Earnshaw, Thomas Earnshaw, Dominic Crowl, Ben Crowl, Jacob Crowl, Doug Stewart, Kathleen Macfarlane , Barbara Anngow, Athene Stewart, Mary Fraher, Jeanette Milner (longstanding family friend), Celia Crowl, Paul Stokes.

Thursday, December 21, 2006

Tribute to Pat Crowl ('Mumma')

This is the text of a tribute I gave at Mum's funeral today. Some of the family said they'd like to see a copy of it. My apologies if it seems rather long (!) Mike

Pat Crowl.
Mum was born on 27th May, 1917, the 4th child of Charles and Flora Hannagan.
She was one of a family of nine children, two of whom died very early.
At first they lived in Elgin Rd, but later moved to a somewhat bigger house at 7 Stanley St. It must still have been crammed, with two adults and seven children, and only three bedrooms.
Mum had to leave school quite early, though I’m not sure when. Certainly she had little secondary education, something that niggled her throughout her life, since she was bright and would have benefited from more schooling.
One of her jobs after leaving school was as a housemaid at the home of the original Arthur Barnett family in Highgate. She had to walk all the way from Stanley St to Highgate, and then walk home again at the end of a long day. She was never very much enamoured of this particular job! However in 1934 when she was 17 she began work at the Roslyn Mills in Kaikorai Valley. In those days this was a huge enterprise and there was plenty of scope for young workers.
She stayed there until she went to Australia, in 1942, and then worked there again when she came back from Australia in 1948. I can remember going down there when I was small: the machines were enormous. Someone working on the big knitting machines would spend the day walking back and forward changing bobbins, with the clatter of several other large machines beating their ears constantly.
In her teens and early twenties she played cricket, and we have several trophies at home telling us that she was the best bowler in the St George’s Cricket Club over the period from about 1936 to 1942. I have a memory that she played for the Otago Women’s Cricket team at some point, but haven’t been able to verify this.
She was enthusiastic for all sorts of sports, as the several scrapbooks she made in her teens and early twenties testify. And also for the ‘sport’ of flying: Jean Batten features strongly in these scrapbooks. If my memory serves me right, when she went to Australia, it was in a flying boat.
Her enthusiasm for cricket never waned, and she would often listen to cricket games while lying in bed at night when she lived at our house, or watch the games on television with the sound off because she found the tv commentators inferior to the radio ones.
In 1942 she went to Australia. She corresponded regularly with a number of people throughout her life, but there was one penpal in particular called Frank Crowl who lived in Melbourne and was a brilliant chess player. Quite how things came together I’m not sure, but she went to Melbourne around September 1942 and was married in October. I have in the back of my head that Frank had proposed to her by correspondence (he played chess by correspondence a good deal as well, so perhaps it was a natural approach for him), but I have nothing to back this up.
This big adventure didn’t quite take off: Frank was not a natural husband or father. Chess was his life, and everything else came second. He lived before his time, in the sense that if he been born twenty or thirty years later he may have made a career out of the game. In the forties, people didn’t make money from playing chess.
My mother had to work for both of them, and got a job in the Rationing Department, and then in the Post Office, as a mail sorter.
I was born in 1945, the only child to come to full term. My mother suffered at least three miscarriages. Because she had to work in the daytime, she left me in the care of a home run by Catholic nuns for unmarried mothers. Apparently I was very popular with all these ladies.
In the end my mother must have decided that coming back to NZ was her only option, for her own health’s sake, and mine. Both of us were undernourished and unwell. She told me once that she expected my father to follow, but I think that was a fairly faint hope. He continued on with his chess playing, but not having any what we would now call ‘marketing skills’, he spent the remainder of his life struggling, and died in 1965 owing money to people – most of all to my mother.
Mum and I came back to a full household in Stanley St. My two grandparents were there, my two young uncles, and - as I only just learned the other day - so were my recently-wed Auntie Monica and her husband Des. Seven adults and a three-year old child. Stanley St was crammed again, and the two young uncles must have turned the lounge into a bedroom.
Mum went back to Roslyn Mills, and I grew up with a bunch of adults.
We shared a love of movies, and one of the things I remember is waiting for her to finish work every Friday so we could go to the ‘five o’clock session.’. And, though she never played any instrument herself she encouraged me to learn the piano, something which I took to like a duck to water (mostly!) and for which I’ve been grateful ever since. She did like to sing, but an operation she had on her throat at some point turned her into a baritone, and after that she stopped singing for the most part.
In 1965 she finally gave up working at Roslyn Mills, and took up a job in the Records Dept at Dunedin Electricity. She was highly successful in this, and when she retired in 1977 she was greatly missed.
Meanwhile in 1974 I had returned from living in England with my newly-wed wife. I’d been away from home for six years, during which time my mother faithfully wrote to me, week in and week out. (I wrote in return, by the way, having picked up her writing bug.) Celia and I lived with her in Stanley St for a time, before finding a flat of our own. But before we left, our first child was born, and Mum began her new career of grandmother-come-second mother, and soon began to be known as Mumma.
The family home in Stanley St was deteriorating, and though Mum had the option of living there as long as she liked, it was obvious that we either had to spend a good deal of money on repairs, or come up with another solution. Mum kept mentioning how she needed to book a room up at the Little Sisters, but we hated the idea. (And she would have hated living there.)
In the end my wife Celia came up with the idea of building a second storey on top of our house. The Stanley St home was owned jointly by all the Hannagan brothers and sisters, and we asked them if they would pool the money earned from the sale of the house in order to build Mum a home within a home upstairs at our place. In general this was agreed to by the family, and with loans and gifts from them another storey was built, and from 1984 Mum became a live-in grandmother.
Quietly and subtly she took over the laundry, the housework, the gardening. We did battle over this for a time, and then gave in. She was determined to be a fully-functional grandmother - not one who sat back listening to the cricket all day. All who know her will have benefited from the glories of the garden she built up at our home. And the new potatoes that would arrive faithfully in time for Christmas each year.
Then there were the cats. There had always been a cat at Stanley St since I was young when an unwanted kitten turned up at the door one day. As soon as one died of old age, another would arrive. When we lost our favourite family cat (Mamble) at Glenpark Avenue, a scrawny pregnant cat arrived not long after and deposited two kittens under one of the beds. They grew up under Mumma’s care, and only died in the last couple of years. There was also Libby’s black cat, who was very aggressive and often gave Mumma bleeding hands or legs. Nevertheless she just kept on loving it until it loved her in return.
Dominic will shortly tell you about the way things were when the children were growing up with her in the house, and the huge contribution she made to our family life. None of us would be the people we were if it wasn’t for her presence in the home over a period of twenty-two years.
I haven’t talked about her spiritual life. It was a quiet, down-to-earth kind of spirituality that got on and did the job without fuss. It was a faith plus works spirituality that believed (without actually talking about it) that being a servant was one of the prime ways of expressing yourself as a disciple of Jesus Christ.
We have only a small understanding, I suspect, of the amount of serving she did in her lifetime. For instance, in 1962 she took unpaid time off work to stay home and care for her mother, who was dying of cancer.
We also have only a very small grasp of the amount of praying for people that she did. Certainly she prayed for all of us in the family, but I can’t believe we were the only ones she prayed for.
She would attend Mass in all weathers. She cleaned the brass in the church for years, even hauling those heavy items back and forth from home to deal with them. I’m sure many of you in this community know more than we do what other works of service she did.
Mum wasn’t an outgoing person, at least in her later years. Nor did she enjoy being the centre of attention. She would have preferred a funeral where no one else came. But she delighted in the achievements of other people, especially those in her family, and we have found dozens of mementoes of special occasions amongst her things.
She was one of God’s great servants: I believe she’ll now be rejoicing with him, chatting to him about the enormous garden he’s prepared for her, and suggesting, no doubt, that there are some everyday chores she could get on with for him, especially now that she’s got her strength and her youth back.

Monday, December 18, 2006

Pat Crowl: 1917-2006

After nearly three days of being at home with us, asleep and sometimes struggling for breath, Pat Crowl died quietly - almost while we weren't looking (!)

A number of family members (including a surprise visit from Mary and Paul Fraher, and from Catherine Hannagan) came, as well as other friends. It's been a good time, with Mum there, even though she's been asleep, and people have been relaxed and talking beside her.

We're going to miss her hugely: she's been an integral part of our family for around 22 years. She's lived upstairs, babysat, done a good deal of the housework and gardening, loved the kids, and then their kids as well, loved us even when we weren't always the easiest people to live with, shared her income generously with us and with a surprising number of charitable organisations (as we now discovered), and in general been a faithful daughter of God.

Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter into the rest the Lord has prepared for you. (A mansion with an enormous garden which she'll have the time and energy to cultivate for eternity...!)

Friday, December 15, 2006

Update on Pat Crowl

We brought Mum home this morning, by ambulance. On Wednesday it was found that she had had another bleed in the brain, and the neuro-surgeon said there was nothing else that could be done for her. She had been going downhill for a few days, more and more sleepy and complaining of pains in her head. On Monday and Tuesday she was barely responsive.

After this news was given to us, it happened that the whole family were gathered together in the hospital room and we decided that it would be more comfortable altogether for her to be at home, with her family, and without all the clamour of the hospital and dreariness of the bland room. Though the hospital staff have been great, there's a huge inconsistency of care, as one shift changes to another, and various staff are rostered on and off.

So she's been brought home to sleep out her last days. We've put her in the big lounge downstairs, rather than back upstairs in her own part of the house, mainly for everybody's convenience (we have district health nurses coming three times a day). One of us will probably sleep in there with her, and the kids may be able to 'spell' us at night occasionally.

We don't know how long this will go on, but she's neither eating nor drinking (the hospital staff said that feeding her would only prolong the inevitable), and she may be here for Christmas; she may not.

Sunday, December 10, 2006

Pat Crowl's health


Just an overview of what's been happening with Pat since last Wednesday.


I found her on the floor of her bathroom (she lives upstairs in our house), about 7.30 am. She said she'd been vomiting for some time, and she was very weak, and still feeling like she wanted to be sick every few minutes. We got her into her lounge, and called the ambulance, after a short debate (she didn't 'want to trouble anyone.')


The ambulance came and the two guys did the usual routine of asking all sorts of questions, when all you wanted them to do was get her down to the hospital pronto! They took her down the stairs in a special chair, somewhat concerned about their backs (although she's a featherweight these days) and Celia went down with her.


I had to wait for someone to come for an appointment, but after that I went down and stayed with her until they took her up to the ward in the afternoon. It was learnt, eventually, that she'd had bleeding from a burst vein in the brain - a brain aneurism, to be more precise. This accounted for the vomiting, and the very sore neck she had - both symptoms of this problem, because the brain's ordinary fluid gets mixed with the blood from the vein, and the two irritate each other somewhat.


Her right eyelid was closed too, perhaps as a result of a shock to the nerve. This isn't good as it's the eye she sees best out of. Her other one has a macular degeneration, and she only has peripheral vision in it.


For the first couple of days she was often confused about where she was, and who was visiting her. Celia stayed with her a good deal of the time, getting her settled at night and going in first thing to make sure she was okay in the morning. On the Thursday morning she was so concerned she rang my only out-of-town daughter, Libby, to come down, and she did, in the afternoon, even though by that time Pat had settled down a lot and was much more lucid and behaving normally.


Her limbs are fine, (her grip is definitely fine), and her speech, hearing and sight (what she has of it) are all fine. The specialist indicated that there would be some swelling as a result of the injury after a couple of days, and this proved correct: yesterday she was very uncomfortable with a severe ache over the right eye (where the vein had broken) and a return of the neck ache. This has eased off somewhat today, although she's also had a lot of codeine.


At first we thought she'd had a fall in the bathroom while being sick, but it seems more likely now that she passed out at some point. She had a graze on her nose, which she said had actually been there for some time, though it looked fresh, and another over her left temple. However, it now seems likely most of the damage was from the burst blood vessel rather than a fall.


She's now stable, and lucid all the time, but very tired (not helped by the endless pills she's having to take). There's concern over her blood pressure, which the hospital staff are trying to keep down. Today it hasn't been very good.
The photo is of Pat (or Mumma, as she's better known) and Israel, one of her great-grandsons.