Apr 8, 2008
Uncle Albert was a British Israelite, whatever that may mean. I think it had to do with measuring the galleries in the pyramids using a mystical measure called a “pyramid inch”, and on the basis of the bumps and hollows in the ceiling, to interpret the past, and foretell the future. But I may be wrong about that. It never rubbed off on me. As a child I was scared of him. He was very intense.
But my Dad, who was not a religious man, could put that side of him aside, and was full of admiration for his ability, his kindness and his courage. In later years I too admired him. He never gave the British Israelite stuff to me, though he could quote the Bible, and other literary sources very appositely on all sorts of occasions. That in itself was pretty remarkable. He had grown up as a farm boy at Niriaha, not the best known settlement in the north Wairarapa, but probably familiar to some citizens of Eketahuna. As far as I know he never went to secondary school but he taught himself and his mind was crystal clear.
He must have been among the first to volunteer in the First World War, for he went to Gallipoli, and survived. Dad met him in France during the second battle of the Somme. Dad, who was of an inquisitive turn of mind, had got out of the trench to go and examine a British tank, one of the first of its kind, which had broken down and been abandoned not far away. He was surprised to find that the crew had been seated on bicycle saddles, and was nosing around to see what else he could learn, (or perhaps souvenir), when he received a sharp whack on the legs, and looked down to see that something, perhaps a piece of shell case had passed between his legs and taken a substantial piece off the calf of each. As he commented later, if it had gone an inch or two either side of where it did, he would have lost a leg. Anyway, the fellow that came and gathered him up on a stretcher was Albert.
Dad got transferred to hospital in England, and he must have met up with Albert again there, for it was Albert who took him to visit at his girl friend’s home in Brixton, where he took a shine to the girl friend’s sister, who subsequently became my mother.
Both those sisters and also a third, married New Zealand soldiers and after the war the whole family migrated to New Zealand. Albert built a great two storeyed house in Masterton and accommodated their mother, now widowed, and also their adopted younger brother, for the next twenty odd years. Meanwhile he ran a bookshop in Masterton and did a lot of work for the YMCA.
During the Second World War he continued the YMCA work, running the canteen in various locations, and after the war he worked for Odlins, the timber merchants. He worked in the office, but with his knowledge of timber and building he must have been very useful to them. I remember him telling me years later how Odlins dealt with Walter Nash’s attempt to control inflation by limiting the percentage profit that could be added to various classes of goods. Odlins simply “sold” the item from one branch to another, adding the percentage to each transaction, and then charging the buyer the accumulated price. Only the dockets went the rounds of the branches. The actual item never left the original store.
Then sometime during the late fifties Albert went down with a terrible illness. It was diagnosed as some sort of thyroid disorder, and it caused him to shrink and curl up so there was hardly anything left of him but his shining eyes. Then once, when he was travelling somewhere and couldn’t get to his regular doctor, he went to another doctor, who recognised he was on the wrong pills - something to do with being hypo- not hyper-thyrid, so the pills he was on were actually aggravating his condition rather than curing it. Anyway he put him onto some other pills and in a little while he was once again his normal energetic self. He never straightened up entirely, but that didn’t stop him.
At that time my parents had retired to a big old house that they bought in Taradale, where Dad had spent some of his childhood. Albert and his wife must have been pretty hard up by then, and since there was miles of room in the house they came and lived there for a while. Albert busied himself by getting under the house and replacing all the rotting wooden piles with concrete ones, and realigning the floors. That stretched the wall paper, so he repapered all the enormous walls, (the house had a thirteen foot stud), and repainted the ceilings. Not bad for a man who must have been at least seventy.
Then he and his wife moved to Auckland to be near their kids, and he built a little house on New Windsor Road. There his wife died, but he’d sort of adopted our family by then, and he spent some time working with Barry on his farm at Kirikopuni in Northland. He helped Barry build a clever kind of calf house, which also served as a shearing shed for the 60 or so sheep Barry ran along with his dairy farm. Albert slept in a whare near the house. When Barry saw him lumping his heavy bag of tools up the hill to the calf house, he picked him up along with the tool bag, on the tray of his tractor, and said Albert shouldn’t be doing heavy lifting at his age. Albert responded that a workman who couldn’t carry his own tools shouldn’t be in the trade. That was typical of his attitude.
Barry’s pigs slept rough at that time, according to Barry with a certain degree of racial discrimination, the white ones sleeping under the whare which Albert occupied, while “us coloured folks, we sleep out under de tree”. Albert found the white ones disturbed his rest some nights, for their accommodation was rather cramped, and if one turned it was necessary that they all turn. Albert claimed he would be suddenly roused up by an anguished cry from below with one of them complaining “You’re sleeping on my arm!”
When Dad died in 1963 Albert came down to the funeral, and it was great to have him there. You felt that whatever happened he would know what to do. I remember him standing to attention, as straight as he could, when the last post was played. “Dan Dale was a good soldier”, he said. You could certainly say the same for Uncle Albert.