FOREWORD
A thousand years ago, the ancestors of both my mother and father crossed the English channel around the same time, in the last successful invasion of England. But after that they separated. My mothers people later went west into the American colonies and followed the American frontier until they arrived in California. Meanwhile, my fathers ancestors eventually went east around the world, first into New Zealand and then finally onto the Hawaiian islands of Kauai and Niihau. There these two lines of my family would meet again, a thousand years later, exactly halfway around the world from England, on the opposite side of the planetary globe.
Now here is the story of how my father met my mother.
When my father Lester was some 7-9 years old, his father Aubrey Robinson decided he needed a tutor-governess to instruct the boy. On a trip to California (where he had earlier worked on a construction project in Menlo Park in 1900-1901), Aubrey met a man named Allan Matthew. Allan recommended his own adventurous young sister, Hettie Belle Matthew, for the job. She stayed in the job for two years from 1911-1913, right in the middle of the great 1911-1914 Hawaiian drought, when no rain at all fell on Niihau island for three years.
Many years passed. My father graduated from Harvard in 1924, worked in the pineapple industry on Oahu for a while, and then finally came home to Kauai to work in the family business.
In 1935, out of the blue, a letter arrived from Dads old governess, now Hettie Belle Marcus her young niece, the daughter of Allan Matthew, was about to go on a tour of Hawaii so, for old times sake, would someone from the Robinson family be willing to show her the sights on Kauai when she eventually visited the island?
Hettie Belles letter arrived at a most inconvenient time the entire Robinson family was just about to leave for a relaxing, fun-filled, two-week vacation on the nearby island of Niihau. And in order to accommodate Hettie Bells request, someone would have to give up his vacation and stay behind to do the honors. Eventually, my father was sacrificed for the job, since Hettie Belle had been his old governess. And so, at the age of thirty-four, he got left behind and stood disgustedly fuming alone on the dock as the sampan containing all the rest of the family sailed off for Niihau. As he told me many years later, the last thing in the world that he wanted to do just then was to waste two weeks squiring around some silly little ten-year old girl with pigtails.
In reality, the little ten-year old girl in pigtails was approaching or just past her twenty-fifth birthday. Born and raised in California, Helen Marion Matthew loved animals, was fascinated by cowboys, and enjoyed horse and mule pack-train camping trips to the high Sierras. Just now, during the part of her stay on Oahu, she was exercising the polo ponies of a rich, rising-star army colonel named George Patton then temporarily marooned in Hawaii without his tanks. Helen Marion loved Colonel Pattons polo ponies, but she didnt care too much for the good colonel she thought he was a bit crude and had a roving eye for the ladies. But soon, on the Kauai part of her Hawaiian tour, she would meet the man of her dreams a Harvard-educated cowboy, expert in horse training, and cattle roping, and all other aspects of livestock work. They would have two weeks together (only accompanied by her brother) before the rest of the Robinson family returned from its Niihau trip. And by that time, my father realized that he had discovered a woman who would make an ideal ranchers wife.
During 1911-1913, in her two years as my fathers governess, Hettie Belle Matthew kept a diary of her experiences in letters to her family. It is published here in this book. I have read it and regard it as a good, representative chronicle of the social life of upper-class women and children in Hawaii in those last years of peace, before World War I changed the world. Unfortunately, in her line of work, Hettie Belle was necessarily confined to a somewhat cloistered existence, and she apparently never saw the hard, sweaty, action-packed working world of Hawaiis men. Therefore, since I come from that other world and am a hard working loner, and as I am almost totally bored by parties and the social whirl, I read her account with only mild interest.
Hettie Belle did very accurately describe Aubrey Robinson, her employer although he was rich, he was also a generous man who helped other and employed more people that he actually needed.
This, then, is an account written by a young woman living and working among the upper classes of pre-World War I Hawaii. If it seems a bit frivolous and superficial, it must always be remembered that she was still single and at a time of life when girls focus on the social whirl in order to find future husbands. Eventually, my mothers Aunt Hettie would marry and settle down, and she would develop a far more serious attitude as she faced the trials and cares and responsibilities of full adulthood.
Keith Robinson
Descendant of the prominent land-owning Western-Kauai family
PREFACE
My grandmother had definite expectations about proper behavior, especially when she served formal dinners in her San Francisco home with a maid in attendance. She taught me to set a table using forks, spoons, glasses, and even finger bowls in the correct layout. A stately woman, she wore large jeweled rings and hats with veils when going out for dinner and cards at the Palace Hotel with other widowed friends. Every Christmas I was thrilled to see gift books wrapped in shiny gold paper under the tree, books like Pearl Bucks My Several Worlds, which enticed me with stories of foreign lands. She told me fairy tales, taking the part of the troll or stepmother as we acted out the stories. Granny took me shopping at the high-end department store, I. Magnin, in San Francisco for a dream dress of soft, green wool with white angora trim. While my siblings and I carefully balanced pre-dinner juice and crackers on our laps, she sat at her grand piano to play, and she filled the room with heartfelt emotion. I would never have imagined my imposing, even formidable grandmother as an adventuresome young woman, playing piano in a sprawling compound in an exotic place called Kapalawai, or chasing two children dressed in Edwardian white suits through the Hawaiian hills.
