Our 1960 Journey to A New Life in New Zealand. 10.

This is a diary from 1960. The actual entries are in typewriter font. Added comments are in red. 
The photographs are from that date, some in colour (expensive in those days).

[Ian, Don and Ken, Aden]

28th January

We are now sailing down the Gulf of Aden and so on into the Indian Ocean. To the south of us is Somaliland, and during the afternoon we steamed past the last piece of land we shall see for another fortnight. This was the cape which is the southern edge of the Gulf of Aden.[Cape Guardafui] It had a lighthouse on top of it very high up the cliffs. We had been some 80 miles in passing the shore and the whole of it was composed of sandy cliffs and a beautiful beach.

I retired early this evening with an inflamed duodenum, haven’t had it for ages and this one caught me unawares.

[I can’t recall how I knew that it was my duodenum or who previously might have diagnosed it so. Over forty years later I think it might have been a stress manifestation - who knows?]

29th January

According to the ship’s doctor whom I visited this morning my inflamed duodenum is a chronic appendicitis and I am now confined to my cabin for three days with penicillin injections and fruit juice twice a day.

30th January

A visit from the doctor during which he said that I am the most important patient on the ship. This is due to the fact that he is not a surgeon but a physician and that we are in the middle of the Indian Ocean and therefore if my appendix gets really bad there will be a somewhat delicate situation arising...

However, I have had this trouble before on five occasions and each time it has righted itself, let’s hope that this will not be an exception!

[I never did find out what was wrong and it never occurred again. I’m amazed that I was not more concerned; I should have been terrified but I was only 27 and insouciant. Considering the number of passengers on board, and the large proportion of them being children, it was outrageous that the ‘ship’s surgeon’ was not, in fact, a surgeon. He suggested that in an emergency the ship might take me to the Maldive Islands (3.15 N, 73 E) where there was a Royal Air Force base with hospital! Perhaps, being ex-RAF, I might have qualified for free treatment?

Later, one of the young Australian  passengers, returning home from qualifying as a dentist in Britain, offered, with extraordinary confidence, to take my appendix out with a sharpened spoon if it flared up again. With equally extraordinary confidence I think I might have let him! I think my love of Australia and Australians started on the Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, their approach to life in those days was like a breath of spring air and only confirmed that shaking off the oppressive shackles of conservative, hide-bound England was the best thing we could have done.]

© DON DONOVAN

donovan@ihug.co.nz

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That Calm Sunday

 

A happily retired busy old man. 

When a Chicago company bought mine out in 1990 I took the money and ran - home. I was 57. I could, I guess, have done nothing for the rest of my life but I wasn’t built that way. I grew up with a work ethic.

Fortunately I had had a book published before I ‘retired’ and was working on writing and illustrating the second when the Yanks came. Over the next seventeen or so years I wrote, or wrote and illustrated, about twenty-four books, some large some small, and also cobbled a lot of ephemeral journalistic stuff; deliriously busy, relaxations earned. 

But recently I have felt disinclined to work at the previous pitch and have been bothered by a creeping indolence. Can I really go through life without serious projects? Can I sit and read whenever I feel like it? Or just stare at the birds in the garden?

I wrestled with this problem until I read something recently that revealed an ameliorating philosophy with which I could feel comfortable. In Liddell Hart’s biography of Lawrence of Arabia: ‘T.E.Lawrence’ (Jonathan Cape, June 1964 ed.) he discusses Lawrence’s retirement from the Royal Air Force in February 1935 and how, in the previous October, Lawrence had written:

‘For myself, I am going to taste the flavour of true leisure. For 46 years have I worked and been worked. Remaineth 23 years (of expectancy). May they be like Flecker’s “a calm Sunday that goes on and on”

'If I like this leisure when it comes, do me the favour of hoping that I may be able to afford its prolongation for ever and ever.'

Lawrence’s life was one of enormous achievement. He was an Oxford scholar whose graduation thesis ‘Crusader Castles’ has never been out of print. He was an archaeologist with Sir Leonard Woolley in Palestine. He was deeply and famously involved in the Arab Revolt that threw the Turks out of Palestine in 1918. He worked hard to further the Arabist cause at the post war conferences, feeling sullied and guilty at being part of the British betrayal of Hussein and Feisal. He wrote ‘Seven Pillars of Wisdom’. He deliberately demeaned himself by serving in the lowest ranks of the Royal Air Force and enduring a short, hateful, interregnum in the Tanks Corps.

Lawrence was friend and colleague of Winston Churchill, Emir Feisal, Lord Allenby, Lord Trenchard, John Buchan and many of the literary, political and intellectual figures of his age. He worked hard for his ‘Sunday that goes on and on’.

I liken myself to Lawrence in one way only: I worked hard all my life. If he could comfort himself with idleness then surely so could I?

I wanted to find out more about James Elroy Flecker whose words Lawrence had quoted. They knew each other as contemporaries. The words come from part two of the prologue to his ‘The Golden Journey to Samarkand’:

And how beguile you? Death has no repose
Warmer and deeper than the Orient sand
Which hides the beauty and bright faith of those
Who make the Golden Journey to Samarkand.
And now they wait and whiten peaceably,
Those conquerors, those poets, those so fair:
They know time comes, not only you and I,
But the whole world shall whiten, here or there;
When those long caravans that cross the plain
With dauntless feet and sound of silver bells
Put forth no more for glory or for gain,
Take no more solace from the palm-girt wells.
When the great markets by the sea shut fast
All that calm Sunday that goes on and on:
When even lovers find their peace at last,
And Earth is but a star, that once had shone.

Lawrence deliberately misread Flecker. He used ‘that calm Sunday’ to mean retirement after a long life in service whereas Flecker meant death (which has no repose warmer or deeper than the Orient sand - sands known only too well to Lawrence). Those who make the golden journey ‘whiten’ - their bones whiten - as they wait for the whole world to die, and for earth to continue as another unpopulated star in the firmament.
The long Sunday of Lawrence’s retirement is simply the prelude to Flecker’s!

The Sunday metaphor arises from the fact that in Victorian and Edwardian England Sunday was taken extremely seriously as a day not only of rest but also of propriety: shops shut, theatres closed, best clothes to be worn and a nation-wide silence; those few who did not attend church or chapel lurked behind net curtains for fear of their neighbours’ disapproval!

Sadly, Lawrence died in a motor cycle smash only three months after he wrote that letter to Liddell Hart. He was 47. He was looking forward to a quiet life in his cottage at Clouds Hill, Dorset. I’ve been there; it is a simple two storeyed house where he might have been contented surrounded by books and washed by Mozart. It was not to be.

James Elroy Flecker, born four years earlier than Lawrence in 1884, died in 1915 of tuberculosis; he was 31.
I, approaching 77, have already had a far longer Sunday than Lawrence, and a busier one, too. Now, having read of his and Flecker’s yearning for indolence, I can relax in a house full of books while, as they so aptly have it these days, going with the flow and innocently enjoying ‘All that calm Sunday that goes on and on.’

© DON DONOVAN

donovan@ihug.co.nz

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My Thankyou to the Fighter Boys

I made this pencil drawing in a sketchbook when I was about seventeen.

It was with surprise that while chatting recently to a remarkably youthful 91 year-old I discovered that he was a survivor of those precious few New Zealanders who had voluntarily given their services to the Royal Air Force in World War Two. He arrived in England in 1940, a little late for the Battle of Britain, but he served with distinction flying Spitfires throughout the war.

I can’t imagine that any twenty-two year old New Zealander would today be drawn towards such a conflict, or to volunteer to fight on behalf of what has become an increasingly distant and unconnected country. Our emotional and familial connexions with Britain grow less relevant by the day as our ethnic mixture continues to dilute old Britishness. No regrets, that’s just the way of a changing world.

But while strong ties to Britain remain within the living memory of some of us they have a worth that should not be treated with disdain or cynicism.

What motivated young Kiwis to join the RAF at the beginning of that war? I doubt that they were they spurred by distaste for what they’d heard of the Nazis; political idealism rarely inspires young men. Perhaps it was because of their ancestry, feeling close enough to the old country to feel a sense of loyalty or patriotism? Or was it to draw a bow at adventure? Ah - that’s more likely.

Listening to that old Spitfire pilot reminded me that the 1940 Battle of Britain is commemorated on 15 September every year and that there will still be memorial services held during the week that surrounds it. This year’s will be the sixty-ninth anniversary of when nearly 3000 men who fought in Fighter Command in 1940 will be acknowledged. Of them 544 died that summer and nearly 800 more died before the end of the war in 1945. Of those who survived there are now very few left; a handful of old men who you wouldn’t notice in the street, physically (if not spiritually) diminished by age, many dependent, many helpless, and yet one or two miraculously able.

Soon, as that generation dies and the Second World War takes its place in hazy history, the commemoration of the Battle of Britain will start to be forgotten and its dates and details will live only in regimental tradition as do The Somme, the Relief of Ladysmith, Trafalgar, and beyond those, Waterloo, the Defeat of the Armada and Agincourt. Rightly so: each generation must honour its own heroes while time dulls the edge of pain.

I recall the summer skies of South-East England in 1940; I was seven-and-a-half years old. I remember the throbbing formations of German bombers, the popping of aerial gunfire, that distinctive sound of the Spitfire’s Merlin engine and the black puffs of anti-aircraft explosions. I recall noisy nights in an air raid shelter; a fear that was only ameliorated by having parents nearby. I recollect a small boy’s bursting feeling of pride at the glimpse of an RAF pilot in uniform, those embroidered wings, the odd medal ribbon - perhaps a Distinguished Flying Cross - that undone top tunic button which was the battle mark of one of the fighter boys. Boys! They looked like old soldiers to me and yet so many of them had just left school.

Only later did I come to realize how much, in Churchill’s words, we many owed to that few. Hindsight tells us that had it not been for those squadrons and the insight of their two great commanders, Hugh Dowding and our own New Zealander Keith Park, I might, today, have had German as my first language. Perhaps the Americans would have freed us eventually but that, too, would have had its price.

For the freedoms I have enjoyed since 1940 I therefore take this journalistic opportunity to thank the men of the Battle of Britain and all of those men and women from all the countries of the old empire and commonwealth. Opportunity for gratitude is fading fast. And I particularly thank my chance conversation with that eighty-five year old Spitfire pilot for reminding me; God bless you, sir.

© DON DONOVAN

donovan@ihug.co.nz

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Hard of Hearing? Buy a New Telly

‘What are “genital au pairs”?’ I asked my wife. (I, having lived a sheltered existence, thought something exciting might be passing me by).

‘What?’

‘“Genital au pairs”, they just said it on the telly.’

‘Jennifer Lopez.’ She interpreted, shaking her head in disbelief.

That’s when I realized that my hearing was packing up and that if I wasn’t careful I might innocently get into big trouble.

So I called in at my doctor’s rooms and he got one of his practice nurses to do a hearing test.

‘What do you reckon?’

‘Were you an artilleryman by any chance?’

She explained that I had the hearing of a 70-ish year-old whose ear drums might have been modified by the percussion of gunfire. Interesting: I told her that I’d never actually fired a howitzer but I had been in a Royal Air Force rifle team when I was about nineteen.

She then informed me that if my hearing had been impaired while serving in the British armed forces I might qualify for assistance with the cost of hearing aids. Subsequent investigations via an audiologist led me to fill in form WPA0001 to submit to a remote department of UK War Pensions in which I described a time over fifty years ago…

‘… I served in the Royal Air Force from 1951 to 1953 (Service number 2513297). I did quite a lot of .303 Lee Enfield rifle and bren gun shooting… Specifically, I shot for a Technical Training Command rifle team… Every time I fired a rifle I experienced not only short term deafness (improving over about three or four hours) caused by explosions but also pain; the percussion of explosion caused actual pain in my ears. We were neither issued with protective ear muffs nor allowed to stuff wadding or cotton wool into our ears…’

To give them their due, without much delay they shouted me a hearing test from a top Auckland audiologist who, completing the examination, confirmed that I was suffering typical delayed gunfire symptoms. ‘However, I have to tell you that your hearing is not bad enough for the Brits to pay for hearing aids.’ And he went on: ‘What’s more, as you age and as your hearing deteriorates further you will still not qualify because the goal-posts move inexorably beyond any extension of charity to your case.’

Well, of course. Don’t they always?

He then asked me if I wanted to have hearing aids.

I’d already given this some thought. Asking around I had gained the impression that those of my friends who use them often find them more nuisance than they’re worth; especially when among groups, at a party, or in the ambient babble of a restaurant. I had been warned, too, that they could cost big bucks - indeed, up to several thousand dollars. Thus, even before I learned that any UK-funded instruments were a forlorn hope, I had decided to take an alternative course of action.

I bought a new TV set. This big silver monster, at a price well below half of a pair of hearing aids, has a big flat screen, brilliant pictures, and above all the facility to manipulate its sound tone. Where my old telly had had no tone controls, the new one not only has settings for speech, music, movies and multi-media but also a graphic equalizer that allows me to minimize the duller and sharpen the upper frequencies. I can hear it - perfectly

‘What a good idea.’ the audiologist enthused when I told him about it. ‘Money well spent, I’d say. So, no hearing aids then?’

‘Not yet.’ (I didn’t tell him that a mate of mine who’s quite a bit older than I has agreed to leave his to me in his will.)

Meanwhile, with my shiny new TV I’ve now got a real handle on Jennifer Lopez: she not only looks good but sounds right, too - and that goes for her name. ‘Genital au-pairs’, I must have been mad.

© DON DONOVAN