The legend that is Mrs H

Queenstown / Glenorchy

Helen Hillary is better known in Glenorchy as Mrs H. She was the school bus driver for 17 years and also shuttled a fair few tourists around the scenic area. She is a “get on with it” type with the biggest and best laugh that works its way up from the bottom of her boots.

Living in Queenstown now she has settled into her lazyboy chair with her beloved Ragdoll cat Mandy on her lap to tell, “some higglety pigglety stories from my life at the top of the lake”. But where to start when you have had 85 years of life? Well maybe from the beginning. A tough one, but a start that set her up for living a full life

Helen was born in a little place called Sedgemare just out of Leeston in Christchurch. In her blood are the wide open flats of the Canterbury Plains with its braided rivers and patchwork quilt farms. She says it was a great childhood, alongside her eight siblings, that was full of “heavy slog”. “We were cheap labour for my parents on the farm, put it that way,” and there’s that laugh, contagious as they come. “But it was fun, it was never a chore.”

As soon as she was able to put cups on a cow she became part of the milking gang. It was a 4.30am blurry eyed start to round up the cows into the walk through dairy where the herd were milked for their cream that was sent off to the Tai Tapu Butter Factory. The family’s trusted horses, Blondie, Blue Heather, Ginger and Bonnie, were caught for the ride to school and a saddle put on only if there was time, “and if there wasn’t we would just go bareback”.

“I was a country girl, I still am and a tom boy. I was born between two boys and I had to compete.”

After leaving school early she moved to Christchurch where she met her husband Naylor Hillary at a dance in Latimer Square. Pictures and a whirl around to the tunes of the time were what you did on a Saturday night and the only problem was the bus, the last one being at 11pm when the dance didn’t finish till midnight.

“So one night it was raining and we wanted a ride home from the dance, we asked people if they had enough room for three and we all bunched in. And it was Naylor who took us home in an Austin 7. How's that for Mills and Boons? It ran out of petrol and we had to push it to the garage while he sat at the wheel,” a burst of laughter erupts from Helen that cuts through Mandy’s purring, “It was a lot of fun.”

Naylor was a painter/decorator who had quiet ambitions to be a farmer. Helen, who had vowed never to marry a farmer, said she was a bit cheated. This is said with a wry grin and delivered with the cadence of a well-loved story, “he married me under false pretences because if I had found out I would have walked away,” the laugh this time is a wicked one.

After they were married, Helen and Naylor moved firstly down to Luggate and then on to Glenorchy where they bought out their partner in a 500 acre farm. The stretch of land just before the Dart Bridge - with the Humboldt and Richardson Ranges just over its shoulder - would become their home for 46 years, but at that time there was no house. Helen and Naylor had four kids by then and so a roof over their heads was needed.

“We shifted a house up there,” says Helen, “The road was very windy and narrow so it got a bit of a bruising getting there.”`

The Hillary family’s move to the area was perfect timing for the Glenorchy School that was struggling to get enough children’s names on its roll. With their four kids and then another new family’s five the school not only scraped its way out of the firing line of the Board of Education, it was allocated a school bus.

“Well we got a bus but we didn’t have a driver so Barbara, one of the other mums, and I both decided to go for our bus licenses. The school stayed open, we went from one to two teachers and the atmosphere and the attitude of everyone there was like a great big family. It was really, really lovely.”

Mrs H was what the children called her and she loved to listen to the “running commentary” as she dropped them home. On birthdays it was an ice cream shout all round and sometimes Helen’s cat Tina would come along for the ride. “I loved it, I absolutely loved it.”

Another reason Helen had jumped at the chance to become the communities bus driver was as a way for her to extend her horizons a bit. The mountains, so close, could be overwhelming for the girl from the vast expanse of the Canterbury Plains.

“When we first moved to Glenorchy the mountains felt like they were going to crush me,” Helen’s voice takes on a distant tone as she remembers how hemmed in she felt, “I needed space. So driving the bus got me away from my home. I just needed to see for miles.”

Helen remembers a trip with the kids where she was compelled by an uninterrupted view with mountains as a faraway backdrop, to stop the car. The kids were confused and asked their mum what the matter was, and she said, " I'm just looking. And I sat there for half an hour looking at that wide view.”

Naylor had a sense of what was unsettling his wife and so he came up with a plan that they could move to Australia. They went for a farm scouting trip and looking at the last farm that boasted a mount, with the farmer pointing out the boundaries, Helen asked where the mountain was. The farmer looked at her and said, "you're sitting on it”. Helen laughs incredulously and cries, “it was a bump!”. They returned home and when Helen saw the mountains looming over Glenorchy she was no longer daunted and caged in by them. “They welcomed me. We were at Bennett’s Bluff and I knew I didn’t want to leave these mountains.” Something had changed in Helen and she said it was an amazing feeling. The mountains truly became home.

Helen threw herself into the community helping fundraise for school outings. Trips to the sea in the bus for the country kids who had never seen the in and out of tides. She would drop off supplies to runholders who couldn’t get to town and once relieved a tired mother by taking her screaming baby for a walk. She even accidentally managed to convince the then Vice Prime Minister, Jim Bolger, to tarseal the dodgy Glenorchy road. “Oh he was a nice man!” Helen had taken up a second bus driving job for the tourism company H&H. She would finish up the school run, fuel up, clean up and hop into her next bus to take tourists up to the Greenstone and Routeburn valleys. One of her passengers was the late Jim Bolger who, alongside 19 others, was setting off to explore the walking tracks.

“Mr Bolger and his wife sat behind me and we were going down this gravel road and he said “the road isn’t too bad is it?” and she said “yes and no". “Prior to me picking you up there were six graders on the road to make it like this today”.

“We got to Bennett's bluff, he was looking at the scenery and he turned around and said “so you reckon a little bit of tarseal wouldn’t go amiss Helen?” and I said “I’d love it”. “But there is one thing I would miss, our road is very windy and when you have driven it as much as I have you can see the dust clouds and know when a vehicle is coming”. So the road not only got tarsealed, thanks to Helen, it was widened too.

Helen was a go-out-of-her-way type of employee and she would keep an eye out for Glenorchy’s older residents. Mrs Forbes was one and without necessarily knowing she had noticed, Helen had gotten used to Mrs Forbes’ chimney always puffing out smoke when she pulled up to the school in the mornings. When there was no smoke for a few days Helen decided to check on her with the premise of offering her some cream for her porridge. A knock on the door, resulted in the unlocked door opening a crack and on calling out, Helen heard a small voice calling back.

“I asked her if she would like some cream and she said “yes, but come in and kick the coal range into gear and make me the porridge first, I'm starving.” She was ill and so I went to the district nurse to make sure Mrs Forbes got an evening meal sent to her and I made her porridge with cream every morning until she got better.”

Helen brushes such acts of kindness away as “just what you do, you know what people need in a community and you just get on with it”. A huge sponge cake made by Mrs Forbes was her reward and Helen had to fight off the kids on the bus on the way home, “they all wanted a chunk,” Helen chuckles. Glenorchy, to Helen, was “a great big whopping family. It was lovely,” and although she lives in Queenstown now, Glenorchy has her heart and she can still see the mountains that she learnt to love all those years ago.

“Glenorchy has changed, it really has. It used to literally be the end of the road. It was a great place to live and I enjoyed my life there. I wasn’t competing with anybody, I was just doing what I had to do. I think that’s a good way to live. If you want to do something you just do it. Enjoy yourself, that’s my advice.”

Helen grins, Mandy the cat purrs and Mrs H’s memories fill the room, as wide as a Canterbury plain with not a hint of cloud in the sky and as tall as the ranges that hug Glenorchy with their craggy snow tipped peaks.

MRS. H