From the Centre, page 4
And she is lifting too, lifting to the moon-eye and looking down over water and rocks and trees and paddocks, but at the same time she is playing the music. There are people with faces like wide bowls, looking up at her.
After a time she descends and the music is fading. Soon it has all gone but she knows it is her own.
She walks beside the fence again turning the switches of her radio, and when everything is done she comes, leggy and laughing and pleased with herself, running towards me.
5.
Pita was a late joiner. He never wanted to go to war and told Ma he never would. But after a few years he found he couldn’t not go, couldn’t just sit at home waiting to get on with life — or couldn’t just wait about for there to be the kind of life he wanted to get on with and not do anything about it. He had to get in and help end it, not expect others to do it on his behalf.
— from Tu
WHEN WORLD WAR II BEGAN, MY FATHER HAD NO intention of joining up. He had a wife and family, a new house, and he had been promoted in a job where he was well thought of, according to my mother, and where he had invented an envelope. The traditional envelope produced by John Dickinson’s was made of a central rectangle, with triangles folding inwards from the four sides. My father worked out that an extra envelope could be cut from the same-sized sheet of paper if the flaps were squared off and the top and side flaps reduced in size. He took this idea to his boss who gave him five pounds. The new envelopes eventually came into production.
Photograph of Dad taken before he left to go to war in Italy. FAMILY ARCHIVES
I came in from play one day to find my mother sitting with a letter in her hand, unopened, but she knew what it was. She was upset, saying over and over, ‘He didn’t tell me.’ My father had enlisted for war without her knowledge. These were his call-up papers.
To go to war meant leaving work, which would likely not be available for him on his return. However, as time went by and it became evident that the war was not going to be over as quickly as people first believed, his conscience wouldn’t allow him to stay home while others, as he saw it, were away fighting on his behalf. Added to this — and it may have been a deciding factor — his good friend Ernie who, being Pākehā, had been conscripted into the army, had gone away early in the war and had been listed among men missing in battle. He was never found.
Being Māori, there was no conscription to affect our father. He joined up with the volunteers of the 28th (Māori) Battalion in the early 1940s, but it was some time before the contingent left these shores. There were months, perhaps a year or more, when he was encamped for training and only home on occasions. I looked forward to those times, knowing that he would have stories of Ergie the duck who lived in the stream near where he was camped and who had become tame, following recruits about ‘like a puppy’.
BEFORE HE WENT AWAY, WHILE HE WAS GOING TO AND from camp, my father bought an old car. It had one headlight and a canvas hood. It was not used on a day-to-day basis. I believe the main purpose for having it was so that we could go to the bach in the weekends. Our family lived rather an isolated existence in Melrose in the early years, though my mother did have weekly contact with her family. Now that we had a car, we could take ourselves off to Hongoeka Bay to spend weekends with my father’s whānau.
When we were ready, Dad would crank-start the car and, once the motor was turning over, off we’d go down the Melrose hills with the motor turned off to save petrol. On board would be our supplies for the weekend, including a home-baked creamed sponge cake for Gunny. Once through the city in our one-eyed car, we continued up Ngauranga Gorge (built by relief workers during the years of the Great Depression) and on over the winding metal roads through Johnsonville and Tawa to Porirua and Plimmerton. We entered Hongoeka Bay via a neighbour’s paddock.
In those early days Māori were not allowed, by law, to enter a hotel, a law that didn’t change until a few years following World War II, but in later times our excursions to Hongoeka began with a stop at a pub in Wellington for a crate of beer. Still, early days or later days, beer did arrive from somewhere. People gathered around the bach, or under the lucerne tree, and there’d be singing and drinking all night long, sometimes into the next day as well. My observation was that the adults took it in turns to sleep, wake, start over again. These parties were not always at our bach, but went from house to house, weekend after weekend, especially during the war years. Pub beer wasn’t the only beer available. Some of the uncles made their own. My grandfather did some home brewing too, but this was often sabotaged by my grandmother, who we were told would toss a half-bucket of creek water into it. I remember helping to cap beer bottles in my uncle’s yard, placing the new caps onto the recently filled bottles, fitting the capper over them and hitting down with a hammer so that the caps clawed in to seal the bottles.
In recent times I’ve heard or read interviews and stories from Māori musicians who have referred to these ‘guitar parties’ as part of their own beginnings as musicians — night-long singing, old songs, latest hits, nonsense, all interspersed with Māori medleys, to guitars and ukulele, instruments that went from hand to hand. There were other improvised instruments too: spoons held in one hand and vibrated against each other, or between hand and lap; notes sung through cigarette paper held against a comb; a teaspoon twirled in the neck of a bottle; bottle-tops nailed to a broom handle; tearing newspaper; a tea-chest bass.
At Hongoeka Bay I belonged to everyone, going the rounds of aunties, uncles and grandparents, and being carted around by Helen and older cousins. Beer drinking and socialising were not the only activities. Depending on the seasons and the tides, whether before the war or for many years afterwards, my father would be out fishing, or around the point getting crayfish, which came in to shallow water at certain times. He and others would walk out on to the rocks with a long piece of mānuka. Bound to the end of this was a short iron spear, no more than thirty centimetres in length. He would sight a crayfish hidden under an opposite rock, spear it and quickly turn the spear up so that the cray would not slip off, and put it into his sugar bag. These hessian bags held seventy pounds of sugar and had many uses once the sugar had been repackaged for sale into paper bags. They were good for the carrying of fish and shellfish because they allowed water to flow out through the loose weave. While the adults looked for crayfish, we played on the beach, swam, floated around on driftwood logs, caught herrings or fished from the rocks. The men would fill their bags with crays and carry them on their backs, delivering them to the different houses on the way home.
AT THE COMPLETION OF THE TRAINING PERIOD AND before going to war, my father returned from camp for several months, having been ordered to keep up his fitness during the waiting period. He took a job at the Ngauranga Freezing Works. My mother said that he walked (ran) there each morning, a distance of about 12 kilometres. What I remember of that time seems to support this.
What I recall is waking up (or being woken) in the dark of early morning — and it was very dark. As a precaution against enemy invasion, there was a blackout over the whole city; the whole country, for that matter. Before nightfall, all windows in every house had to be covered in such a way that no light could be seen from the outside. There were no street lights, no vehicle lights. (However, on some nights the whole sky would be lit by sweeping shafts of light coming from the aerodrome below. They were searchlights, crissing and crossing like giant knitting needles as they sought out possible enemy planes.) Awake in the dark, my mother and I would look from the bedroom window, right down on to Hornsey Road, a whole hill slope away, watching for the little glimmer which was my father going off to work with a small torch shielded on the top side with a hood of black paper. Though we couldn’t see him, he would blink his torch at us before disappearing around the bend in the road.
From those memories I wrote a story titled ‘When the Lights Go On Again All Over the World’. It appeared in Writing Wellington (Victoria University Press, 1999), but was never anthologised. The title comes from a song sung and made famous by Vera Lynn during the years of World War II:
Some mornings, when there was a moon, they could make out the two silver patches of water and the ghosts of houses, the shapes of buildings and hills. But this morning, there in the dark, it was as though there was nothing about or below them at all, apart from the rattling wind. It was as though she and her mother, her brother who was asleep, and their father on his way to work, were the only people in the world, living in the one and only house. Sometimes Mereana’s mother would say, ‘One day the lights will come on. There’ll be lights in the streets again. People will let their blinds up and take the blackouts down. We’ll look out and see everything lit for miles.’
Now, kneeling on the big bed in the dark, there was just one light that they waited to see as they looked down to where they knew the road to be.
‘There,’ her mother said, and she saw the faint, bobbing light, knowing it was her father with a shade on his torch and his lunch in a tin bag, going to his job at the freezing works.
They watched, and at the place down there where they knew the corner to be, they saw the little light stop a moment, jig from side to side as her father waved goodbye, then it was gone.
She got into bed with her mother who said, ‘He’ll be at the top of the road already.’ After a moment she said, ‘He’ll be on his way down the hill.’
THE 28TH (MĀORI) BATTALION REINFORCEMENT LEFT for war early in 1944 when I was six years old. My mother, baby brother and I arrived at the wharf to say goodbye. With us were many of my father’s relatives, who would have come from Hongoeka by train. I don’t remember all of them being there, but his notebook, which I read sixty years later, mentions all the farewell parcels that were piled on him by his family, so many that he couldn’t carry them and had to give most of them away.
What I had believed about going to see my father off to war was that he would be going away across the sea in a big boat with a lot of other soldiers and that we were going to wave goodbye to him. I had thought I would see him and a whole lot of his army friends at the waterside, launching their dinghies, stepping in and taking up their oars as they did when going fishing.
Nothing was as I expected. I found myself in a large, jostling crowd, looking up and out toward what seemed to be a huge building with rows and rows of soldiers in tiers down its sides and taking up positions at railings, waving and calling down. More soldiers could be seen filing into the ‘big building’. There were no boats that I could discern, there was no sea for my father or any boat or any soldiers to go across.
My letter to Dad sealed with 12 kisses. FAMILY ARCHIVES
After a long time of waiting, my father was spotted on one of the upper decks, lemonsqueezer in one hand, sweeping his arms out and back, out and back to attract our attention. Another long wait and the big building moved. Soon water became visible, increasingly so, as troop ship Aquitania moved off.
We left the wharf and went back to our house in Melrose, where we waited, looking out over the sea until we saw the Aquitania emerge from the headland on its way to war. We went throughout the house, switching the lights on and off, hoping that my father would see our signals, even though it was full daylight. There is a reference to this in the first letter I wrote to Dad while he was away.
6.
DURING THOSE YEARS MY FATHER WAS SERVING OVERSEAS, my mother kept up visits to his family in Hongoeka. The old car had been left there for Uncle George, his younger brother, but it was never used. It needed repairs, but also petrol was rationed and not affordable. We would set out from Melrose on a Saturday morning, travelling by bus, or tram, but walking some of the way as well. Along Lambton Quay, we’d go into Gates, which I remember as being a café/milk bar, where we would have tomato soup with toast fingers before going to catch the train.
Wellington was full of American soldiers — the marines — in training in this country prior to being shipped off to war in the Pacific. They were friendly and talkative and gave out oranges and chewing gum to kids on the train. On one particular journey, one of these men gave a demonstration on what to do if you didn’t want to eat an orange but wanted to drink it instead. He made a small round hole in the skin of the orange — a little smaller than a dollar coin. He placed his lips around the hole and squeezed and sucked. He had a great audience of kids. I was most impressed but don’t remember ever trying it.
HONGOEKA BECAME A DIFFERENT PLACE FOR A FEW YEARS after the Americans arrived. They were encamped not far away, in Paekākāriki prior to leaving for war in the Pacific, and much of the training took place around our coast. Rolls of barbed wire were spread along the foreshore and a ‘tank trap’ was dug out in low hills ‘out back’, behind the houses. This was a steep-sided, deep hole, about the width of a house and the length of three, filled with muddy water.
The rolls of wire and the tank trap were precautions, we were told, against invasion by the Japanese. I know now that the big hole was on the road to nowhere, and of more danger to kids than to enemy tanks which, had they arrived, would’ve had to go looking for it.
The coastline, north of our houses, was where the Americans practised manoeuvres and set up for target practice. Some of the big shore rocks were used as targets. One particular rock became known as Split Rock after it had been divided in two by shellfire, becoming two prongs, pointing skyward.
US troops marching at Paekākāriki. ALEXANDER TURNBULL LIBRARY 1/2-C-006574-F
One of our aunties who lived in Paekākāriki opened her house to the Americans, stipulating that once they entered her house there was ‘no rank’. This was Aunty Jean Andrews, whose story has been told in Gaylene Preston’s 1995 film, War Stories Our Mothers Never Told Us.
Her interaction with them began on a rainy night, early in the piece, when two very wet marines knocked on her door and asked if she had a room to let. She didn’t have what they asked for, but invited them in to dry out by the fire. Jean didn’t realise it at first but there were several others waiting out behind the hedge. She ended up with thirty young men who had bought food and drinks from the local shops. The marines might have arrived, but their supplies had not. She showed them to the kitchen where they cooked what they had brought with them. A little later her husband came home, bringing two or three officers with him. One of these officers began looking over the younger men and picking on certain items of uniform that didn’t meet with his approval. He ordered the men back to camp. Aunty Jean wasn’t having any of that. She, like many Māori women of her time, and even now, was kind and generous, and always shared what she had. But she was also a straight talker when it came to what she believed to be right and fair. She told the officer that he couldn’t give orders while in her house, that just because he had pips on his shoulder it didn’t make him better than anyone else. If anyone had to leave it would be him. On another occasion, when white soldiers had come to boil their clothes in three coppers she had in her yard, she overheard derogatory, racist remarks being made about their black ‘comrades’. She told them off roundly.
Many of the manoeuvres were out at sea. Jean told of the day that several small boats were caught out between Kāpiti Island and the mainland when a southerly storm came up. The boats were overturned and all in them were drowned — over a hundred men. The residents of Paekākāriki, Jean among them, combed the shores for bodies for three or four days. They couldn’t search at night because they weren’t allowed lights. So they would go down to the beach at first light to begin the day’s search. They’d pull the bodies ashore, wrap them in sheets of canvas, or blankets, and move them to be picked up and taken to she didn’t know where. Jean lamented the deaths of young men who hadn’t even been into action. She also felt especial empathy for the sixteen-to nineteen-year-olds, away from home, never to return, just as her own cousins and nephews were on the other side of the world with the Māori Battalion, not knowing if they would come back.
MY FATHER WAS THE ONLY ONE FROM HONGOEKA TO GO TO war in Europe with the armed forces, though several of his cousins from Porirua and Waikanae served overseas. Some didn’t return. He took photographs of their temporary burial places, perhaps meaning to pass these on to their families on his return. However, they remain in my mother’s photograph album. A few years ago, I took copies of these photographs to descendants and relatives, who were pleased and interested to receive them. One who did return did so by hospital ship. This was our Uncle Petera, Gunny’s nephew, who had spinal injuries and was transported on arrival to Wellington Hospital, where he remained in a cast for a year or more. On that same ship was his cousin Hurumutu, who had gone to sea as a fourteen-year-old, shovelling coal on the early steamships, and who was now working on the converted troop carriers. He continued to do so throughout the war.
I missed my father. I asked my mother who would sharpen my pencils now. I had watched him do this with a butcher knife, making all sides of the pencil tip even, scraping off rough edges, bringing the lead to a fine point and scribbling it down on the edge of a newspaper to remove the sharpness. At the other end of the pencil, he would slice away a shaving and write my name there. It was my father who used to read to me, though I remember having only one book in those early years. It was a collection of traditional fairy tales. There was a book of poems I was aware of, but it had been put away on a wardrobe shelf for when I was older. I would read to my father from my primer book, as I had just begun school. These were the days when he was awaiting the call to war.
