When Mary May was 15, she was summoned back to the farm to help her mother with chores — milking the cows, making the butter, or helping with her eight younger siblings.
The oldest daughter of Cardrona Valley sheep farmers, she did not question it — it was just part and parcel of what life was like back in the 1950s.
"Dad had me earmarked to come home and help Mum because, after all, she had a very big family.
"I used to drive the truck so Dad could feed out on the back of it. We went from loose hay to stacked hay, to little round bales that we had."
She milked the family cows by hand, separated the cream and made butter from scratch.
As the daughter of sheep farmers, Jack and Mollie Scurr of Spotts Creek, she was probably destined to marry a man who worked sheep for a living, she said.
And that she did, when she was 20.
She met Alan May, of Cromwell, while she was working at the Wānaka post office one evening.
"He was a musterer up at Hunter Valley Station in Hāwea.
"He came around to ring his girlfriend and I think she ditched him that night, something like that, that’s how I met him."
The couple worked on several farms across the district including at Lake Hāwea Station where she said owners, the Rowleys, were "super people".
They then moved back to the Cardrona Valley before taking on her parents’ farm at Spotts Creek.
"It was modest in size by today’s standards."
Nowadays, Hamish and Mark Mackay each own half of the original Spotts Creek Station after Mrs May’s younger brother, John, sold it.
In 1969, she and Alan bought Wentworth Station in Gibbston where they farmed 8100ha.
The couple farmed much of the flat land, now filled with vineyards, as well as the high country.
"All the flat land has been sold off and it is just a high country run now," Mrs May said.
"Most of them don’t have the flat land now as it is all in vineyards."
The scenery had changed vastly from their farming days.
Mrs May, 89, said she was in favour of development and said Gibbston valley was one of her favourite parts of the country to visit.
She loved the way it had reformed over the years.
"There was none of that. The land was on the useless side, you couldn’t farm it.
"Now they have tidied it up ... and I just love it the way it is.
"I think progress is wonderful."
The Mays sold the land in 1994 and the couple bought two farms in Tuatapere, Southland.
Within the first two years of living there, Mr May developed a brain tumour and died at the age of 62.
Mrs May moved to Arrowtown in 1998 and found a life of her own, she said.
Her husband’s death was devastating, but "you get on with it".
"A little like my mother when she lost her mother at a young age — she always said you just have to get on with things, so you did, you just get on with it."
She developed a garden, visited the local Catholic church, got a part-time job and made new friends.
Life alone had not been easy, but she was grateful for a warm community and to return to her home, in Central Otago, she said.
"Probably remarrying now would have been a good idea, as you sit here and you have no-one to talk to at night time.
"But never mind, that is life."
