It was while I was at Waiouru that the letter came summoning me to a further interview and I was not able to be there. I had already enrolled at University for three subjects. French, my best subject, Pure Mathematics and Applied Mathematics. They would have fitted in well with attendance at Training College but when I was not accepted I had to get a job. My Father reckoned that I should go for the Public Service as that would be the only place where I wouldn’t get the sack due to my attitude. I got the forms and had to write down which departments I was interested in. I wrote down several including Public Works, Health and even Railways and Post and Telegraph which were not part of the Public Service proper. I was still scratching my head when one of my brothers came in a said that one of the men in the Battery worked in Customs and was always talking about the amount of booze they got hold of. At my age I didn’t drink at all especially being a track athlete and a fitness fanatic but I put that down as well. In the end that was where I was sent.
With a Higher Leaving Certificate or Bursary I would have been one of the most highly qualified applicants and in those days the Public Trust and Customs had the pick of the crop. The Labour Government had recently imposed Import Licensing and Customs needed large numbers of cadets. That year Customs took on at least twenty and with the system of seniority we were graded in the order that we started work right down to the day. It meant that I was at least ten places below one who became a good friend but who joined in February whereas I joined on 28th March. This order determined promotion and resulted in much heart burning later on. In the meantime I was faced with a problem in fitting the University schedule into my week. I found myself at University four nights a week and on Saturday mornings.
After several months I had had enough and decided that I would have to cut down to two subjects. I then made a bad decision. French was my best subject so I decided that I would drop Applied Mathematics. In order to be able to sit the exams you had to ‘keep terms’ by attending enough lectures and doing the assignments. I had been skipping the Saturday morning lecture which was French Conversation and although I started to attend them again it was too late and I was debarred from sitting the exam in French. I sat Pure Mathematics and passed but you had to pass in a minimum of two subjects so it didn’t count. However the war was now on and it all seemed rather academic to say the least. That was the end of my University career except for a brief effort while I was overseas.
After the problems of the annual camp the C.O. decided that with my educational qualifications I would be better employed surveying in the guns so I had a better time after that. The war started and at nineteen I was called up for local service. I was still having trouble however and despite having reached the rank of sergeant I couldn’t get on with officers. Part of the trouble was that I had been sent on several courses and now knew more than they did.
Eventually when I was in a Wellington regiment I was sent to OCTU to become an officer to get rid of me as much as anything else. Alas I got into trouble there as well. I was chosen to become a mathematics instructor to teach my fellow officer cadets the basics of logarithms and trigonometry. Somehow I fell foul of the permanent army officer who was in charge of the course. When we had the final exam he doctored the marks so that instead of getting 99% I got only 49% and failed. The Commandant was not fooled however and he passed me anyway.
I was sent to a Regiment in Greytown where the Colonel was as mad as a hatter as was my Battery Commander. After several nasty encounters I told them to stick their commission and reverted to the ranks. They had agreed to allow me to revert to Sergeant and to have me posted back closer to home but they welshed on that and I finished up as a Gunner in a shockingly inefficient Medium Artillery Battery in Palmerston North.
I was now back to where I had been when I first joined up, I was a gun number responsible only for preparing the shells for loading into the gun. When we went on manoeuvres the surveyors invariably got it wrong and would have had the guns pointing away from the enemy by 180 degrees. It was only a dummy practice but the guns were big and heavy and the crews were not prepared to accept fire orders that involved them pulling the guns right around and then having to pull them back again. The Officers didn’t know what to do so the Sergeants would call for me to show them where they had gone wrong. The Officers were not prepared to be shown up like this so I received another transfer this time to a Beach Battery at Scorching Bay on Wellington Harbour.
A Japanese midget submarine had penetrated Sydney Harbour and caused some damage and there was a big panic in Wellington. Two World War One 18 pounder guns were stationed at Scorching Bay on a rocky shelf about ten feet above high water mark. They would have been quite useless as they were not meant for this sort of job. They had a very flat trajectory and the only time they were fired they ricocheted off the water cleared the hills behind Days Bay on the other side of the harbour and killed several sheep in the Orongorongo Valley beyond. However they looked impressive and as they were never needed I suppose they did the job. A Bombardier (Corporal) was the Gun Sergeant of one gun and I a Gunner was Gun Sergeant of the other. My crew included the Battery Sergeant Major, the Quartermaster Sergeant the Cook and a Driver. We had a lovely time swimming and sunbathing and some of the local ladies entertained the troops as if they were their husbands. The Officers who were all over the age for overseas service were Wellington business people. Their quarters were on the top floor of the Scorching Bay Cabaret. There was a party every night and they seemed to have access to unlimited supplies of booze. It was probably a good thing for me when I turned twenty one and was called up for overseas service.
I was posted to a Regiment in training for the Pacific War. We were stationed in Papakura so I was close to home at last. I was still a bit of an oddity being a lowly Gunner. I had to train the surveyors or Specialists as they were called and after morning parade we would march off under the control of our Sergeant who had been in Coastal Artillery and knew nothing about Field gunnery. He would fall us out and I would then take over and do the instructing. At the end he would fall us in again and we would march us back to the parade ground. It was a standing joke among us all and worse was to come. I was gazetted as a Lance Bombardier with one stripe, the lowest form of N.C.O. I went to the Battery Commander and told him albeit politely to stick his stripe where it would hurt the most. However he was a very affable and persuasive commercial traveller by trade and no matter what I felt he left me with little choice but to accept this insulting rank. My mates had a great time at my expense, they gave me no mercy from then on and I was always referred to as a ‘little shit striper’.
It was about then that I met a guy who became the closest friend I ever had. He was a fellow rebel and right from the start we hit it off. He was posted to us from the Air Force and stood out because he had gained his wings and was entitled to wear them on his army uniform. We were as different as chalk and cheese in other ways. He was a great ladies man and women seemed uinable to resist his charms. He was only a sixteenth Maori but was from an aristocratic family. His Uncle was a Member of the War Cabinet and held the Southern Maori Seat. His name was Trevor Valentine and after his mother died and his father also a great ladies man had been killed in a car accident he was brought up by two aunts.
He had joined the Air Force and graduated as a pilot but had become involved with a woman ten years older than himself. The family were horrified and appealed to Uncle Jim Tirikatene the Cabinet Minister. It was decided that the best thing to do would be to post him overseas earlier than intended which they did. It backfired when he went absent without leave (AWOL) and missed his draft. This of course was a serious offence punishable by imprisonment and in earlier times death. However they didn’t dare do anything drastic in case it came out that his uncle had improperly interfered in a military matter.
As a result he was posted to the Army and the irony was that his girl friend had by now taken up with a Yank and dropped him. We went everwhere together and knew all about each other. He could drink a lot more than I could and in trying to keep up with him I often became the worse for wear. I was more cautious than he was and except in one case managed to keep him out of trouble.
While not approving of the way we carried on our families welcomed each of us and it was after all war time and we were due to go overseas at any time. In the end we didn’t go to the Pacific but went away in the first draft of the Eleventh Reinforcements to the Middle East.
We trained in Trentham and in Plimmerton and I had a pleasant experience in Trentham in contrast to the problems I had in OCTU. They had a diabolical habit of taking us up to the top of the Rimutakas in trucks and leaving us to march back to camp. Marching downhill in army boots tends to push your toenails against the toecaps of the boots and your feet can get quite sore if you have let the nails grow too long. There had been some press publicity over the plight of home service officers who had reverted to the ranks on being drafted for overseas service.
We were paraded for our route march when all ex officers were told to fall out and report to the Camp Commandants Office. I knew that they did not have me in mind since I had resigned my commission but it was a good excuse to escape the route march so I fell out as well. When I went in to see the Colonel I laughed and said that I hoped that he didn’t mind my using the excuse and that I wasn ‘t really one of those involved. To my surprise he also laughed and said that he had read my file and reckoned that I had received a raw deal. He promoted me to Temporary Sergeant along with the rest. This meant a rise in pay and when I went overseas I also received a bottle of spirits free each month.
Eventually we entrained at Trentham and were taken to Pipitea Wharf where the Mooltan an old ship from the P. & O. Line was waiting for us. If there was supposed to be anything hush hush about our leaving it didn’t happen. Hundreds of friends and relatives were on the wharf and there were streamers thrown from the wharf as a last contact with loved ones. I was at the rail looking down not expecting to se anyone I knew when I saw my old girl friend from my days in Greytown who apparently was seeing a brother off. We had been corresponding off and on but after months in Auckland things had cooled off a bit. She seemed delighted to see me and we attempted a conversation amid the shouting and laughing of hundreds of soldiers and families. In the end she took out a notebook and tearing a page out of it wrote me a note. Then she wrapped the note in a half crown coin and threw it up to me. I would have been at least ten feet above her and about the same distance apart but it landed right in my hands which impressed me very much.
The note was to tell me that she was missing me and to write to her as soon as I got into camp and so the romance was on again. I wrote to her right through my time overseas but nothing ever came of it and we probably wouldn’t have got on well enough to marry. She visited my mother once but when I got home neither of us followed it up and it eventually petered out. I was however very grateful to her years later when Joan was in hospital with Polio. John had started school and when the term holidays were due I had nobody to look after him. Norma was by now married to a local boy and on an impulse I rang her and asked her if she would look after John for the holidays. She was taken aback at hearing from me after so long but after thinking it over rang me back to say that she would be happy to help me out. That was the last time I saw her as we shifted to Auckland when Joan got out of hospital and once again lost ouch. I found out recently that she died about ten years ago but how and when I couldn’t discover.
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