Dec 3, 2006
These things I have tried to learn from Terry; that it is possible to be effective without being aggressive, and to be kind without being a wimp.
He was a beautiful child. There’s no getting away from it. With his fair hair and twinkling blue eyes he would have been attractive in any case, but he had also inherited the fine and regular features that nature had bestowed on his mother, and these, along with a frank and ready smile made him a real little angel. In the game of chance that determines which characteristics we inherit from our various ancestors, he seemed to have been dealt all the right cards.
But beauty in a boy is not universally appreciated, and among the ragtag and bobtail kids of Martinborough there were those, not similarly blessed, who felt that his features could do with some remodeling. Tears and bruises became a regular feature of his early school days, and he took to coming home from school by way of a deep drainage ditch, where he could be invisible most of the time.
His father, a large and kindly man, was concerned at his son’s circumstances and looked for a practical solution. When one day he chanced to meet the local gym instructor on the street, he raised the matter with him. He explained that he didn’t want his boy converted into an aggressive bully like his tormentors, but he would like him to learn to defend himself. The gym instructor accepted the challenge, and explained that the manly art of self defence need not involve aggression. With his hands at his sides he said “Hit me on the jaw!”
Terry’s father demurred. He didn’t like that sort of thing, though he had done his apprenticeship in a foundry and was accustomed to the associated rough and tumble..
“No, no.” said the gym instructor, “Hit me on the jaw!”
“No,” said Terry’s father, “I don’t want to get into that sort of thing, especially in the open street.”
“No, Go on!” said the gymnast, “You won’t hurt me”.
So Terry’s Dad clipped him one smartly on the jaw. The gym man reeled back with a cry of pain and protested he hadn’t been ready. He went on to explain that had he been ready he would simply have moved his head so that the blow fell on empty air, and that evasion was an essential and non aggressive element of self defence. He was willing to teach it to Terry.
So Terry was signed up with the gym, and given boxing lessons. One thing that the instructor knew was that achievement would only come with plenty of practice. So after teaching his new pupil a few elementary punches and parries, he took every opportunity to put him in the ring with older boys in his charge who were destined for recognition in the local competitions. Their skills, he felt, could be sharpened if they were given something more mobile than a leather punch bag to practise on. As a small boy’s parry against a bigger boy’s punch is only a partial palliative, young Terry soon learned that ducking and dodging was the best method of keeping his fine features intact. In this he was at one with the instructor and his training prospered. At the same time he discovered that with a watchful eye and a quick hand he could occasionally land a telling blow on his opponent.
Consequently, when he was sent to boarding school at Wellington College, he had already learned to defend himself, and to deal with the boys there who at first mistook his beauty for vulnerability. The phys. ed. teacher too, at first inclined to be contemptuous of Terry’s ineptitude on the vaulting horse and the parallel bars, revised his opinion and became quite supportive after he had observed Terry in the ring. And he was not the only one. The school boxing champion was also quietly impressed. As it happened he occupied the same dormitory as Terry, and many a night after “lights out”, they would leap out of bed in the silence of the night, cast off their pyjama coats and spar for a round or two in the feeble light. Thus did they sharpen their skills on one another.
In his final year at the College, the phys. ed. teacher enrolled Terry in the school boxing contest. He fought his way through the heats until he found himself matched against the champion. This was not a bout he was looking forward to, but he was prepared to take the hiding he was expecting with good grace.
To his surprise and relief, however, the champion decreed otherwise. He said he had watched Terry fight in the heats, and was not prepared to make a public exhibit of himself by trying to match him in the ring. He withdrew from the contest, leaving Terry as the undisputed champion.
My eldest brother, Alan, was at Wellington College with Terry, and I suppose was the source of these stories, for I don’t recall meeting Terry during his teenage years. When I met him in Palmerston North in 1942, in army uniform, I didn’t recognize him. I was trudging down Rangitikei Street on my way from the high school to the Railway Station to catch the train home to Linton, and looking, according to Terry “as if I had nowhere to go and all day to get there”, when I was accosted by this soldier with a ”Hullo, young Pat!”
“Who the hang are you?” I asked, not very politely I must confess.
“I’m your cousin,” he said, “T.C.Dale!”
Well I had a cousin, Tom, but I knew it wasn’t him, and it took me quite a while to work out that it must be Terry. I was not an alert child.
So that was that. Later he got himself transferred to the Air Force, and while he was stationed at Ohakea he used to visit us at Linton from time to time. By then he had terrified an instructor into transferring him from bombers to fighters, so he was training on P51 Warhawks. There are a number of stories about that but the most significant one was towards the end of his training when he was at the head of a formation of three coming in to land. Apparently the procedure is that once you are safely on the ground, you raise the landing flaps so that you can hasten down the runway and leave it clear for the following aircraft, without tending to take off again. There is a lever on one side of the cockpit for this purpose, but there is another lever on the other side for raising the undercarriage, and Terry inadvertently chose the wrong one, which sent his plane skidding down the runway on its belly, with a certain amount of consequent damage to the propeller, and sundry other bits of the plane, and also to Terry’s reputation. His commander wrote “For Carelessness” across the relevant page of his log book, and sent him off to the Pacific to fight the Japanese.
However his effect on the Japanese was less than it might have been. He had not been in the Islands for more than a few months when, on returning from a patrol he landed his Warhawk rather too far down the jungle airstrip so that it ran off the end and wiped its wings off on the coconut palms. The Warhawk was not a wonderful aircraft, but it was the best we could afford at the time, and the High Command did not like to see them wasted in this way, so they sent Terry back to Ohakea where he finished the war flying an Avenger behind which he towed “drogues”, a kind of wind-sock on a string which trailed well behind the Avenger, where it served as a target for trainee pilots and air gunners to loose their machineguns off at.
The Avenger was actually designed for aiming torpedoes at enemy warships, at which it was very good, but it was a versatile aircraft, so as the number of enemy ships for torpedoing diminished towards the end of the war, some Avengers were adapted for dropping fertilizer on hill country farms, from which developed the aerial topdressing industry.
Now Terry had a friend called Tom Newland, who was a very good pilot, and who, when he finished his training in New Zealand waas on his way to advanced training in Canada on the N.Z. Shipping Co’s s.s. “Rangitane”, when it was intercepted by the German raider “Orion” somewhere off the Kermadec Islands. The German captain was a gentleman of the old school, and he took the passengers off the Rangitane before he sank it. Things were then a bit crowded on the “Orion” so the captain put the prisoners ashore on Nauru Island having first destroyed the radio station, and extracted from the servicemen, a solemn promise that they would under no circumstances take any combatant part in the war. They were “on parole”.
In due course someone got the radio working again, and the prisoners were rescued and brought back to New Zealand. Tom was made an instructor of newly enlisted pilots, and taught them for the rest of the war, to fly Tiger Moths. By then he could do practically anything with a Tiger Moth, so it was natural that after the war he should buy one and have it converted for spreading fertilizer over hill country farms. As a pilot, he was a genius. The Tiger moth didn’t have a tail wheel to support the tail of it when on the ground, but had instead a skid arrangement on the end of a coiled spring. Each time it landed on grass the skid removed a small divot where it met the ground. Terry said that Tom’s flying was so precise that at the end of a day of take-offs and landings every fifteen or twenty minutes, the tail skid marks for the day were so near to one another that you could have covered them all with a hearth rug. In fact it was Tom’s precision flying that proved his downfall.
Terry drove the truck that carried the bulk supply of fertilizer, and usually also handled the tractor/front-end loader that fed the fertilizer into the plane’s hopper. However on one occasion while Terry was away getting supplies, the cocky on the farm was in charge of the loader. He noticed that the normal load of fertilizer didn’t fill the hopper on the Tiger Moth, so, being a cocky, he thought he would economise on flights by putting a couple of extra bagfuls in the load. Tom’s precision take-off was not tailored for such an eventuality, so when he went through his normal procedure, the poor plane waddled as far as the fence and, failing to lift over it, somersaulted over onto its back, with much damage. Tom was a tall fellow with a long nose and a short fuse, and you could tell from the way he walked back to the cocky after he had disentangled himself from the wreckage that he was far from being amused.
But Terry was versatile.
He turned up one morning when we were living at Linton near Palmerston North. His face looked rather scalded, and his hair and face were streaked with black. His fingers too were covered with black from what looked like a mixture of engine oil and the black that you get from changing wheels when the wheel nuts are coated with the dust from brake linings. The black on his hair and face seemed to have its origin in his efforts to push his hair out of his eyes with his numbed and blackened fingers. He said his fingers were frost bitten and without feeling.
He had come down from Auckland in a secondhand car he had just bought, and if it had seen better days it had no clear recollection of them. This was about 1950, just after the war, when cars and components of cars were still very scarce and spasmodic. He was living in Otahu at the time, and had bought this prewar six cylinder Triumph 12/6 sports saloon very much in an “as is, where is” condition. “Triumph” it may have been, but that was not the first word it called to mind. He had hardly got home with it before one of the front tyres blew to pieces, and it was clear that it was not in a condition that could be repaired.
New tyres were pretty well unobtainable unless you were a taxi driver or a contractor. In fact everyone’s tyres were pretty well worn and prone to puncture.. If you were driving anywhere in those days, you normally allowed time for a wheel change along the way. However, Terry had a friend whose father worked for the Public Trust in Tauranga, and perhaps because of his public service status, it was rumoured that he could get access to a new tyre, so Terry decided to detour by way of Tauranga on his way south to visit his people in Martinborough. That meant driving from Auckland to Tauranga on four makeshift tyres of which two were meant for a motor bike and were somewhat undersized for the Triumph, and two that were meant for some other make of car, and were somewhat oversized. You did those things in those days. He had no spare, but what else could you do?
The journey to Tauranga was uneventful, except that a leaky radiator meant that he had to stop at every convenient creek to refill it when it boiled. When he reached Tauranga it was only to find that the rumour about tyres and public servants was in fact quite baseless, so the detour had been a waste of time and petrol.
However, between Rotorua and Taupo things seemed to be going better. It was a fine day, the radiator was newly replenished, and he was beginning to feel the joy of riding along behind six cylinders instead of the customary four. He was a little miffed
when a new Chev overtook him and disappeared into the distance but he put his foot down to give chase, and then was suddenly alarmed by a loud rhythmical and metallic clatter from the engine. He knew enough about motors to recognise it as the failure of a “big end” bearing, those soft metal bearings that connect the pistons to the crankshaft.
There was no help near. In those days before the pine trees took over, the road ran mostly through bracken between Rotorua and Taupo. There was nothing for it but to make a repair on the roadside. His plan was to disconnect the big end and replace the soft bearing with a buckled penny or two wrapped around the crankshaft. To get at the bearing it was necessary to remove the sump, and to remove the sump it was necessary to drain the engine oil. With no source of fresh oil on hand it would be necessary to save the existing oil for reuse. The immediate problem was to find a suitable container to drain the oil into. And as nothing else seemed to present itself he decided to empty his suitcase, and use that. As he was opening the suitcase it occurred to him that a length of leather strap might serve as well as a bent penny for a temporary bearing, the more so since he had neither a blow torch to heat the penny nor an anvil on which to bend it. So that was what he did. He drained the oil into the suitcase, removed the sump, undid the big end bolts, and replaced the shattered remnants of the soft metal bearing with a length of leather strap. He reassembled it, put the oil back in and it carried him, rather gingerly, to Taupo.
Taupo, in the nineteen fifties was not much more than a fishing village, with one hotel, one store, and one garage with one mechanic. Spare parts for unusual cars were not to be had. The mechanic offered Terry the use his inspection pit to remove the damaged big end, and suggested that he should take it by bus, either to Napier or Rotorua where he might obtain a replacement. As Rotorua seemed like a retrograde step Terry got on the bus to Napier.
As it happened, Napier, when he arrived there, was celebrating the Hawkes Bay Anniversary or something, and all the shops were closed. With some difficulty Terry managed to talk an engineer into reopening his workshop by mentioning that his father was also an engineer, and by making an appeal to his sense of fraternal solidarity. The engineer grumbled but kindly fabricated a new white metal bearing, and Terry returned on the next bus to Taupo to reassemble his car.
While he was working on it he happened to mention to the mechanic that the radiator was also giving trouble. The mechanic brightened immediately. He would soon fix that. But on emerging from the pit, Terry was alarmed to see the mechanic pouring oatmeal from a bag, into the radiator. He explained the theory of it. When the gruel encountered a leak it would solidify on contact with the air, thereby making a sound temporary repair. Terry was only partly convinced. However, he was anxious to get on his way and there seemed to be no point in arguing.
“What do I owe you?” he asked the mechanic.
“How much have you got?” said the mechanic.
At least that’s one version of the story. Another is that he said that it would be four pounds a day for three days, but as three wouldn’t go into four, he would make it fifteen pounds.
At Turangi there was a notice advising that the Desert Road was “dangerous after snow”. but as it was snowing at the time, Terry took this to mean that the road was not yet dangerous, and carried on. At the altitude of the volcanic plateau the radiator boiled more readily than ever, and when Terry stopped at a creek to add some cold water, he removed the cap and received a blast of scalding porridge in the face. He wiped it clean with snow as best he could. But thereafter, when the radiator boiled between creeks, he contented himself with piling snow on top of it and waiting for it to cool. Hence the frost bitten fingers.
Towards Waiouru the steering went funny, and the cause soon revealed itself when one of the front wheels fell off on the road. It seems that the wheel nuts had not been tightened sufficiently at some stage, and the wheel bolts had gauged out the holes in the wheel until the nuts could pass right through them, and let the wheel go free. This looked like another occasion for roadside repair. There was the spare wheel of course, but it had no tyre on it. With neither a pump nor a set of tyre levers, there was no way of transferring the tyre on to the spare wheel. However, fortune sometimes favours the brave, and while Terry was searching for the jack under the back seat, he happened upon four steel washers which would be just the right size to cover the enlarged holes in the wheel, so the wheel nuts could clamp it in place.
There was another problem though. With the axle resting on the road, there was no room to get the jack under the car to lift it while he replaced the wheel. But once again Terry’s luck held, and he found, protruding from the snow, a steel fence post, and near it a suitable sized boulder to act as a fulcrum. Using the post as a lever, he could stand on one end of it, and while he thus raised the car, could edge the jack under it with the other foot.
So he got the wheel back on, and in due course arrived at our place at Linton.
Like I said, he was a versatile fellow. His wife’s parents had a manufacturing business in women’s clothing, so for a number of years, Terry was a traveling salesman for the firm, and apparently quite a successful one, holding the bust of the dress out with his clenched fists, and holding the hem of the skirt out with one leg, so as to show the flair of it. The customers loved him.
On another occasion he converted a big caravan that his father had built into a pie cart, and made a living selling fast food to holidaymakers on the beach at Gisborne. Then when Pam and I were first married he would turn up at our little house in Christchurch from time to time, driving a great truck for Wormald Bros., the fire prevention equipment people. He could do anything.
Later he moved to Auckland, and after operating for a time as a second hand car dealer, set up a very successful little business, publishing a “Motor Traders’ Guide”, for the enlightenment of second hand car dealers. He traveled to England to see how they did such things there, and was sufficiently impressed with their efforts to have them buy his little business for a princely sum, and appoint him as local manager. With this injection of capital he and Tom bought an enormous machine into which you could feed rusty girders, and it would fire ball-bearings at them until all the rust had been removed, and the girder could be re-galvanised or painted. It worked well while the supply of rusty bridges lasted.