TONI EVANS
When asked about his favourite childhood pet, for last week’s Street Talk, Ian Davey smiles.
“I grew up on a farm,” he says. “Animals were enjoyed, but they had their place.”
Dogs worked and lived outside, cats caught mice, and orphan lambs were hand-raised, taken to school pet days, then returned to the flock.
Ian met Nova in 1968 and the couple went on to share 56 years of marriage. Together, they created a real farm menagerie in Pokororo while raising their children.
He says that while others had the flat, they had the hill farm – steep and bushy.
Eventually, the family secured some flat grazing land, but in the 1980s they were approached about selling.
“We told the kids about all the opportunities in town – jobs, bikes, the pictures, sport, friends. They said, ‘Well, you can go, but we’re not.’”
The children loved growing up on the farm, and today they all maintain rural connections of their own, through farming or lifestyle blocks, raising their children close to the land.
Ian says, selling later on was still the right decision.
“You’ve got to get out while you’ve still got time. The farm wasn’t economical to hand on.”
His beloved wife Nova, who passed away earlier this year, kept her connection to the Valley through the Orinoco church and women’s groups. She loved playing the organ, and Ian chuckles about last Easter when the technology failed and the congregation sang the opening hymn unaccompanied.
“I told the reverend Nova would probably have been saying, ‘If I’d been here, there wouldn’t have been a problem.’”
Now living on Thorp Street, Ian laughs that it is “becoming a Valley neighbourhood” – a popular place for former valley families to retire, with many old friends once again living nearby.
