The Resthaven rest-home resident celebrated her 100th birthday in Gore yesterday with family and friends.
Mrs Larking (nee Courtney) said after she passed her proficiency examination at about 12, she went home and worked on her parents’ dairy farm at Waimumu.
It was during the Depression of the 1930s.
Two of her jobs were to raise calves and make butter from the herd’s milk. The butter, sold in the grocery store in Mataura, was very popular.
‘‘People asked for it,’’ Mrs Larking said.
There were many rabbits on the farm and she helped her father and brother trap the rabbits and skin them.
‘‘They were a nuisance until we caught them.’’
The skins were sold to a furrier in Dunedin but no-one in the family ate the meat.
‘‘I couldn’t eat rabbit — the smell of them.’’
Once she put her hand down a hole to catch a rabbit and a rat bit her on the finger.
‘‘It grabbed hold of me and squealed.’’
Before her father, John, married he had been a rabbiter which was a lucrative business in those days.
‘‘Grandad [John] bought a farm with rabbit skins.
‘‘There was money in rabbits.’’
She met her future husband, Jock, when he offered her a lift as she was walking along the road.
They married when she was about 21 and moved to a house they built in Gore.
The couple had two daughters.
She kept a big garden, orchard and hens on the property.
One reason she had lived so long was because she was busy gardening and cooking, she said.
‘‘I always kept fit.’’
Her husband died in 1995.
Mrs Larking lived in the house they built for 75 years before she moved into the rest-home when she was 95.
- By Sandy Eggleston
