Oct 13, 2005
It seems strange doesn’t it, that there should be people in your own family that you grew up with but never really got to know. Alan was seven years older than me, and though that doesn’t seem to mean much now, when you’re a child it makes a world of difference.
When I started primary school in 1934, (I was six then, but Mr Forbes’ government had decided to balance the budget by letting everyone start school a year late.), Alan was already going on the train each day to Wanganui Tech. By the time I started going to high school in 1941, he was already flying night fighters over England, an occupation from which he didn’t return. Seven years can be a long time. He was always a distant figure to me. His friends were not even in the same families as my friends in the village. In the school holidays when I might have expected to see more of him, he was away with his friends making hay, or helping on their farms working with stock, or just looking for birds’ nests or rabbits. At meal times he sat at the end of the table opposite Dad. (Mum sat at the side nearest the stove, next to Hilary). The rest of us sat along the back of the table against the wall, and didn’t really come into the conversation.
One night when Dad was in a bad mood, he walloped me and flung me out the back door for eating too fast. Alan was out there feeding a bottle to a pet lamb in the dark. He let me have a turn at feeding the lamb, and then took me down to a hut he had built out of macrocarpa branches at the back of the section, and let me sit there till things settled down. That impressed me. I wouldn’t normally have been allowed anywhere near a hut of his.
In those days you had to pass a “proficiency” exam at the end of your primary school year, before you could be allowed into secondary school, on a “junior free place”. All the schools were closed on “Pro Day”, and it must have been in 1935, when Hilary was sitting Proficiency that Alan took the three of us, his young brothers, on an expedition that we have remembered ever since. He packed some lunch of bread, and eggs wrapped in newspaper, along with a fishing line and bait, and a box of matches. He took us away across Duncan’s paddocks, over the railway line, (it still ran through Fordell before they put the Turakina tunnel through underneath us), and down to a creek at the bottom of Burnett’s place. Then he threw the baited hook into the creek and let Barry hold the line till, with great excitement, we caught an eel and brought it ashore. Then he got the rest of us gathering willow sticks and made a fire with the help of the newspaper off the eggs. While the fire was getting going, he skinned and gutted the eel, and we scorched bits of it impaled on sticks and held over the flames. I don’t remember that it was delicious, but we ate it, and professed to enjoy it, with a bit of toasted bread.
When the fire had burnt down a bit, he showed us how to wrap the eggs in mud and bake them among the embers. It’s the technique that Maoris used for cooking birds, and the feathers came away when you unwrapped the baked mud, just as the egg shells did for us. I don’t know where he learned all this, for he was never a boy scout or anything. I don’t think Dad could have taught him, though it’s possible that he learned the trick in the mud of the Somme.
By the time he finished secondary school at the end of 1939 we were living at Kakahi, near Taumarunui, and he had a job with a survey gang, surveying the road from Taumarunui to Tokaanu, so again we didn’t see him very often. I recall that he got lost in the bush somewhere on that job and had to spend a night out before he found his way out again. He didn’t seem to be unduly shaken by it. He seemed to know how to look after himself under all circumstances.
When he joined the Air Force in 1940 he did his initial flying training on Tiger Moths at New Plymouth, and bought a second hand Harley Davidson motor bike. He rode it home on leave once on those dreadful gravel roads. It was already dark before he got as far as Taumarunui, and he still had ten miles to go. On the Piriaka hill the headlights failed and he went over the side into the blackberries. Fortunately the shock brought the lights back on, and he was able to find the bike and switch the ignition off, though he couldn’t lift it back onto the road. So he walked the remaining five miles home, arriving after we had long gone to sleep. In the morning Dad took us in the car to recover the bike and Alan rode it home. He was pretty self sufficient. Perhaps that was why they chose him for training as a fighter pilot. For that he trained at Ohakea on a rather out of date biplane called a Hawker Hind. When the engine failed on a cross country flight, he landed the plane intact in a paddock near Woodville, and hitched a ride back to base. Perhaps that was why, at the passing out parade before they went overseas, the chief instructor said to him, by way of a farewell message, “Nothing less than a DFC from you, Dale.”
But it was not to be. In England he flew Hurricanes for a while, but then, in 1941, the Germans had found daylight bombing too expensive, and had gone over to night raids. Alan transferred to night fighters in the hope of seeing a bit of action. (His friend who had come through training with him had already been shot down in a Spitfire on “daylight sweeps” over France, and perhaps Alan was feeling a bit left out of it.) The night fighter of the time was a strange creation with a gun turret called a “Defiant”. As well as the pilot it carried a gunner in an electrically operated turret with four machine guns.
The guns were going over Bath the night they took off from an airfield in South Wales. But before they got near the action, they ran foul of the steel cable of a barrage balloon. (Barrage balloons on long cables were used to encourage the German bombers to fly high, where the anti-aircraft gunners would have more time to get a shot at them, but they were a constant hazard to any aircraft in the area.) The Defiant went into a spin, from which Alan managed to recover it, but it was badly damaged and he and the gunner had barely enough time to get out of it. For some reason Alan’s parachute didn’t open. The gunner came and visited us after the war, but of course he couldn’t throw much light on it.
Mum and Dad took it bravely, but you don’t ever get over things like that. We left Kakahi soon after that and went to live near Palmerston North. Perhaps it’s as well that children don’t get to know each other too well.