Marguerite Nancy Story was born in 1928 in a region of New Zealand’s North Island known as The Waikato. She was the second daughter to Arthur and Daisy Story; her elder sister Belinda was four. They lived on a dairy farm - her father, had fought in the First World War at Passchendaele and there was a scheme whereby returning soldiers could buy land at favourable rates. The depression of the 1930s saw the farm fail and the family moved to a smaller place north of Auckland when Nancy was three years old. She said that all she could remember of that first house was that all the furniture seemed very large.
There was no house on the new farm and the family stayed with Nancy’s grandparents on the neighbouring plot while her father built them a new home. In 1931 her younger brother, Pat, was born.
Life on a small dairy hill-farm in New Zealand in the 1930s was no doubt spartan but at the same time idyllic for children growing up. The summers were warm and pleasant and the winters mild and wet. Nancy and her siblings swam on the beach, rode donkeys and kept pet lambs. They walked each day to the school in the village and rarely wore shoes. Their ‘private’ beach and island forms part of the world renowned Goat Island Marine Reserve today.
Life was very basic as was their diet – Nancy recalled that as a child she believed that meat was something you chewed and then spat out. The only beef they ate was old dairy cow which they bought off a donkey cart from an old man who used a branch to keep the flies off. There were no tractors or machinery and it was all-hands-on deck with scythes, rakes and donkey sledges for the family to get the hay in before Christmas. If this was successful the family would let the cows dry off and take a holiday in a hotel in Auckland. Nancy, Binda and Pat travelled in the back of their Model-T Ford down 15 miles of gravel road to reach the nearest town and the route to the city.
There was no secondary school nearby so Nancy moved to Auckland and boarded with a family while attending Auckland Girls’ Grammar. This arrangement is still very common for children from rural New Zealand.
Nancy was a good student and after passing her School Certificate she made her first trip to England with the family in the late 1930s returning to New Zealand before the outbreak of the Second World War.
The war years were quiet for Nancy as they were for much of the population. Her father joined the New Zealand Mounted Rifles and, together with other farmers, patrolled the coast. They were much like England’s Home Guard except that they were looking out for the Japanese. Nancy, her sister, brother and mother ran the farm while the men were away. The only thing they could not do was to start the big old engine that ran the milking shed. For this purpose an elderly neighbour used to walk out from the village twice a day.
Nancy was in Auckland when the war ended on VJ day and remembered very drunk people walking about on the tops of shop verandas and trams.
Nancy loved her life in New Zealand very much and might have stayed there all her life but fate took a hand and in the late 1940s her father unexpectedly inherited some money from a distant cousin killed in the conflict and decided to move the family back to the family farm in Ireland from whence he came. Nancy, not officially an adult, had little choice but to go too.
The move from a tiny four-room wooden house, little more than a shack, to the Story family house in County Cavan must have been quite a culture shock for Nancy who in later life, described Bingfield as “A fairly modest country house in the Irish Georgian style set in several acres of parkland, a home farm of 200 acres with appropriate buildings and cottages and several outlying pieces of land which were all let.” She recalled their return to post-war England saying that they were so unready for how depressed and broken everything was; nothing like their previous trip.
In the early 50s Nancy moved to London to study ‘cello and singing at the Royal School of Music. In the holidays she returned to Ireland where she helped on the farm and enjoyed horse riding and tennis with friends not to mention shooting rabbits on the front lawn with a rifle. It was during the years in London that she met David Douglas-Withers, and they were married in Dublin cathedral in 1955. Nancy decided that a career in music was not for her and she went to work in the office for electrical supplier Joseph Lucas. She and David shared a flat in Notting Hill back when that was the cheap end of town and started taking weekend trips away from the city looking for a house in the country. Her husband’s criteria for house-hunting were simple – trains to London and good beer. So that is how Nancy ended up in a cottage in rural Oxfordshire just a short distance from the station at Henley-on-Thames and Brakspear’s brewery.
Ten years later when the marriage failed Nancy was left with 3 children below seven years old and no dependable means of support so she went back to college as a mature student and became a teacher of young children, a career that lasted her until retirement. She lived in Park Corner for 65 years and always played an active role in the local Church, music and social scenes. She pursued her love of music singing madrigals with the Yewden Singers, choral works with the South Chiltern Choir and playing ‘cello for the Henley Symphony Orchestra. True to her farming roots she kept rare-breeds sheep for many years and loved her gardening.
Never having written a eulogy before I was unsure about how to finish so I thought I would leave the last words to the people who knew her, so here, without further ado, they are: independent, outdoors, Bad Jelly, Song Bird, Lovely singer, Mushrooms, Singing, dear girl, music, dame-of-sark, indomitable , fun loving, singing-in-the-car, Strong woman, walking holidays, water-colours, travel, choir, orchestra, madrigals, cello, cottage, teacher, garden, skiing, camping, sheep, goon-show, rude-jokes, dogs, cats, jams and marmalade, sheep, caring, generous, compassionate, Ford Capri, home cooking,embroidery, crafts, welcoming, kind, wonderful mum.