CHAPTER ONE

EARLY DAYS

My life has been in three distinct periods - the pre-World War II days of my childhood and the beginning of a career; then the total change to war service as a pilot in the Air Force; and thirdly the post-war years in journalism. A career embracing the pen and the sword.

I was born on July 8, 1918 at my parents' home in Paice Ave, Mt Eden, Auckland. Soon after my birth the family moved from Paice Avenue to 21 Empire Road in Epsom.

My father was the mercery buyer at Smith and Caughey's department store in Auckland . In 1922 he bought a mercery and general drapery business in Cambridge in partnership with William Ward. The firm was called Sayers and Ward. So the family moved to Cambridge.

In Cambridge we lived first in Alpha Street then moved to 7 Hamilton Road which was the family home until my mother died. Our homes were always called “Homedale”, the name being on a copper plaque. I lived in the Hamilton Road house from the age of five until I was 22.

In 1924 my father bought his first car. It was a second-hand 1922 model Dodge made in the United States of America. Because New Zealand roads were so primitive, most cars were American. British cars, being built much lower to the ground, could not always get over the uneven surfaces. Even the Dodge, the chassis of which was high off the ground, got stuck one time on a back road when it became suspended by the differential on a rock. The car was an open model known as a tourer. To give protection from wind and rain it had side curtains with translucent celluloid panels. My mother always sat in the back seat wearing a head scar and draping a rug over her knees. When we went for a Sunday outing we carried two four-gallon cans of petrol on the rear luggage carrier because there were no service stations in those days. We always carried a picnic hamper so as to have tea somewhere along the road. My father drove at 25 miles an hour (about 40 kilometres an hour). Although my mother could not drive (not many women did) she kept an eagle eye from the back seat on the speedometer to ensure my father did not drive any faster.

When my parents visited Auckland they travelled by train. The five-hour car trip to Auckland was seldom undertaken by anyone. The road over the Te Kauwhata hills was often so deep in mud that cars had to be pulled out by horses provided by a local farmer. Few roads anywhere in New Zealand were tar-sealed.

I began my schooling at Cambridge Primary School. I had a pleasant and secure childhood and youth in a loving family environment. In those days children did not have a huge array of toys. My treasures were a Meccano set and Hornby trains which were added to by Christmas and birthday presents. We had great fun in creating our own imaginative games. Sister Joan and I had a make believe organization called the Scarlet Scouts which had a flying wing made up of our kites.

When horse races were held at the Cambridge racecourse we would have our own races by running round a track we cut by lawnmower in a spare paddock at the back of our home. We made paper money for betting. My close friend, Ken Ward, and I played cricket matches against each other on that back paddock where we had cut a pitch. I remember my father, a keen cricketter in his day, would stop his Saturday afternoon lawnmowing to watch us and before long he was over the fence to join in with his crafty left-hand slow bowling which fooled us both.

Life was simple and in some ways primitive. My mother cooked on a coal-fired range. Homes did not have refrigerators nor washing machines. For the weekly washing my mother fired up a copper to boil the clothes and turned a hand wringer. Smalls were washed on a corrugated board. We had no radio until 1935 but we did have a clockwork-driven, squeaky gramophone. We had electricity for lighting but no electrical appliances. During the depression years of the ‘thirties we had no car so the Sunday afternoon outing was a family walk. Most Sunday evenings I went with my father to the Anglican Church.

The Waikato was then, and still is, a major dairy farming district. Dairy factories were only about five miles part because there were no motor milk tankers collecting milk from the farms. The farmers had to take their milk on a horse-drawn wagon to the factory.

One time when I was twelve years old my mother went to Auckland for a hospital operation. My father and I were alone at home. After school I cooked the evening meal for us. On one memorable occasion I decided I would give my father a treat by baking his favourite ginger nuts which he liked for his supper before bedtime. I became muddled and measured the ginger for the quantity of flour specified in the recipe. I realized my mistake before cooking so I bulked up the flour with the result that I had enough mix for hundreds of ginger nuts. They turned out well but eventually I had to feed the surplus to the neighbour's fowls! My evening meals, however, were a great success.

After primary school I went on to Hamilton High School, traveling daily from Cambridge by train. I can thank my sister, Joan, for my going to Hamilton High, one of the top schools of the country. She and brother Marsden had gone to Cambridge High School until Joan's last year when she went to St Cuthbert's College for Girls in Auckland as a boarder. Her experience of the better education there led her to convince my parents that I should go to Hamilton instead of to Cambridge High.

In my first year at Hamilton High I was junior athletic champion and in subsequent years represented the school at the Waikato Secondary Schools Athletic Championships. I was injured playing rugby in a qualifying game for the first fifteen and was in hospital with a broken humerus bone, being critically ill for three days with blood poisoning. That was in the days before antibiotics had been discovered. That put paid to school Rugby but I was able to continue playing cricket at school and after leaving school I played club cricket at Cambridge. At Hamilton High I passed the University Entrance examination. In my last year I was a school prefect.

At high school we had compulsory training as Army cadets. Some of our teachers had been Army officers in the First World War. In those days, when the world was still deep in an economic depression, we, as young schoolboys, never envisaged that before the decade was out we would be engaged in a world war ourselves. I had regularly gone with my father to the Anzac Day dawn parade in Cambridge and heard the crunch, crunch, crunch of marching feet in the darkness and then watched with emotion as the survivors of the first war emerged in the light of dawn to form up at the cenotaph. We paid homage to the war dead and to the returned soldiers, sailors and airmen in the disillusion that their war had been “the war to end all wars” as it had been optimistically proclaimed. But I had not long left school before the shadow of war began to loom as Adolph Hitler's German Nazi party threatened world peace.

But, meanwhile life was to be enjoyed. In my late ‘teens I had fun dancing. Cambridge was the social centre of the Waikato because all the main balls were held in the Town Hall there. On the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the founding of Cambridge a jubilee ball was held at which we dressed in period custom and groups were formed to dance such old-fashioned dances as the minuet and the gavotte. I remember wearing a white-powdered wig and being dressed in pantaloons and white silk stockings, with a buckle on my shoes.

My twenty-first birthday in 1939 coincided with the 21st of two of my friends, Buster Snelling and Jim Meredith. To celebrate the birthdays, the parents of the three of us hosted a dance in a local hall which was attended by all our friends. My parents gave me as a 21st present a suit of tails which in those days was the appropriate dress to wear at balls. Sadly both Buster and Jim were killed not so long afterwards in World War II, Buster in the New Zealand Army anti-tank regiment in the Western Desert in North Africa on January 12th, 1941 and Jim in an R.A.F bombing raid on Germany on January 10th, 1942.

Another social activity I enjoyed in my teen years was the tennis parties at private homes. I usually attended these with Buster Snelling. Buster and I also enjoyed rabbit shooting with .22 rifles. We were always welcome to shoot over farmers' lands because it helped to control the rabbit menace.

I had always had a dream to be a journalist. Indeed, from the age of seven I was hand printing periodically a home newspaper for family consumption. At Hamilton High School I printed on a jelly pad copies of a newspaper I sold to fellow train students for threepence a copy. New Zealand had been in an economic depression in the ‘thirties. I had been fortunate that my parents enabled me to stay at secondary school for a good education. But by 1935 my father had become anxious that I should begin to earn a living. Openings on newspapers for journalists were very scarce. It seemed that my dream would not come true. A chance for a printing apprenticeship arose on the Cambridge local newspaper, the Waikato Independent. My father urged me to accept it even though he was well aware I really wanted to be a journalist. His desire had been that I should become an accountant in order to go into business with him and my brother Marsden who was already learning the mercery business in Auckland . But accountancy did not appeal to me.

There was a three month trial in printing before having to sign an apprenticeship agreement. So I became a “printer's devil”. But I kept telling the editor-proprietor that I did not want to be a printer. Just before the time came to sign the apprenticeship agreement, fate intervened to resurrect my dream. The only reporter on the paper went down with influenza. The editor asked me if I thought I could stand in for him on an assignment. I was only too eager to. He sent me home to scrub the printer's ink from my hands and to dress more appropriately. He liked what I wrote and decided the paper could do with another reporter. So began the fulfillment of my dream and my career in journalism. My pay was eighteen shillings and sixpence a week ($1.85 in decimal currency).

After eighteen months on the Waikato Independent, the Waikato Times, an evening daily newspaper in Hamilton , asked me to join the staff as a junior reporter which meant a promotion and an increase in pay. I had apparently made an impression on the Waikato Times when I had stood in over the Christmas break for the Times' Cambridge correspondent and by luck a number of important stories broke at the time.

Memorable assignments on the Waikato Times were covering political meetings in the 1938 General Election campaigns. A Labour Government had been elected for the first time in New Zealand in 1935. In 1938 it was re-elected after a brilliantly managed campaign in which the principal Cabinet Ministers toured the country as a group who all spoke aggressively on the same platform with showmanship which almost mesmerized the huge crowds who attended their meetings. Television did not exist in those days and radio did not provide an immediate and full coverage of election results. To watch the progression of the counting of votes a huge crowd congregated out side newspaper offices. The Waikato Times had a big floodlit results board on the facade of its building. Some reporters gathered results from the Returning Officers and phoned them to other reporters who took their messages on the phone and others manned the big results board pasting up the figures. We worked rapidly but it was great fun being involved in an exciting operation. Cheers or groans rose from the crowd as the figures went up. The exciting election night atmosphere of crowd involvement has not existed since the advent of television succeeding to the role of election night reporting.

Another memorable assignment on the Waikato Times was interviewing General Freyburg who had been appointed commander of the New Zealand Army Division which was to serve in the Middle East in World War II. Another was reporting from Auckland the nation's fervent welcome home on February 23, 1940 to the New Zealand cruiser, H.M.N.Z.S. Achilles from victory in the Battle of the River Plate. At that decisive sea battle on December 13, 1939 the Achilles and two British cruisers, H.M.S. Exeter and H.M.S. Ajax, so badly damaged the German pocket battleship Graf Spee that her commander scuttled her after seeking refuge at Monte Video, Uruguay . I was one of only three reporters allowed on Achilles to interview the captain and members of the crew.

On September 3, 1939 , Great Britain had declared war on Nazi Germany which had invaded Poland . The news came on the 9 p.m. radio news which my father and I were listening to at home in Cambridge . My father, who very seldom drank at home, went to the cupboard, took out a whisky decanter and poured stiff whiskies for himself and me. I was only a few months past my twenty-first birthday and had never drank whisky. My father was obviously shaken by the news. He no doubt realized that his sons would be going to war. New Zealand immediately declared war in support of Britain . I volunteered to be a pilot in the Royal New Zealand Air Force. Brother Marsden who was a gunner in the Territorial Army was called up for active service the night war was declared. He served on coastal defence until joining the New Zealand Division in Italy .

Now that I am elderly I can understand the emotional toll on parents as they sat at home year after year wondering whether their sons would eventually return home, especially when the war news was so grim in the early years of the conflict; anxious as they scanned the growing list of casualties published in the newspaper and finding the names of sons of close friends with whom they would commiserate; and fearful every time a telegraph boy appeared on the doorstep that he might be the bearer of news that a son had been killed.

Sister Joan later joined the New Zealand Wrens. All three of us became commissioned officers. And , by good fortune, all three of us survived the war.

It was natural that I should want to fly in the Air Force. From an early age I had been keen on aviation. My first passenger flight was in 1928 in the Southern Cross, a tri-motor Fokker monoplane piloted by Charles Kingsford Smith, who had recently made the first flight across the Pacific Ocean from the United States to Australia and then on from Australia to New Zealand. He was barnstorming round New Zealand when I made the flight from a farm paddock at Rukuhia. It later became the site of an Air Force station during the war and subsequently the site of the Hamilton Airport . The flight cost me five shillings (50 cents) for which my parents allowed me to raid my moneybox. The flight in the Southern Cross was only ten minutes but it cemented my interest in flying which led when war came to my volunteering for the Air Force.

My youthful enthusiasm for aviation invoked an interest in making flying model aeroplanes. They were very primitive, the fuselages being of carton paper and the hand-carved propellers were powered by wound-up elastic bands. Needless to say they did not fly very far. But they did fly, which gave me immense joy.

After enlisting I had to go before an Air Force selection board which accepted me as a pilot. I then passed the stringent aircrew medical examination. One key element was the colour vision test. A considerable number of males have defective colour vision but fortunately mine was 100% which was necessary to be a pilot. In my keenness to be fit enough to be accepted for pilot training, I quit smoking and ran several miles a day while awaiting my medical. I was apprehensive that I might fail the stringent eyesight test because I had been wearing spectacles for reading due to an astigmatism. But I did pass the test and was advised by the testing opthalmist to discard the glasses which had corrected the astigmatism. What a thrill that was.

There was still a wait before starting training. All aircrew recruits had to attend night school while carrying on their civilian job. The night school course in advanced mathematics (which is the basis of navigation), navigation itself, Morse code and Air Force history and law occupied nine months. I passed with a 98% mark (the minimum requirement for air crew was 80 %) so I was able to proceed to the Air Force early in February, 1941. While awaiting the call up I, of course, continued as a reporter on the Waikato Times. One of my main assignments was reporting the courts, both magistrate's court and the Supreme Court. This gave me quite a good insight into the law. The Hamilton magistrate, Stanley Logan Paterson, was very helpful to me in giving me advice about cases I reported. And the Hamilton Law Society graciously gave me access to their law library.

Naturally I was out among the public a lot so, to show I was a volunteer, I wore a “V” badge in my suit lapel. This was intended to shield volunteers from the stigma of being given a white feather by anyone who assumed you were shirking war service.

White feathers had become quite common in the initial period of the war before the Government introduced conscription for the Army. Under conscription the names of all single men(later it was extended to married men and later still to married men with children) aged 21 or over where put in a ballot allotted names were published in the newspapers as a signal to report to the nearest Army recruiting office. Those who had already volunteered for the Navy, the Army or the Air Force were, of course, exempt from conscription.