Anzac Day Reflections 2009

For recent Anzac Days I have blogged about my late Grandfather, Bertie Daysh and his experience as a prisoner of war in Austria, and the great work the Red Cross did to make his and others' lives as prisoners bearable.

I wrote of how I came to love attending the services at the cenotaph, cathedral square or in Westminster Abbey.

This year was different.

This year, I joined my family, parents, sister, her fiance after they'd gone to the Dawn Service, and headed out to my sister's house for breakfast, and then spent the day together with her husband, my 6 year old nephew, and 3 year old niece.

The previous owner of my sister's house was quite the hoarder, and they've been remodelling, so we were kept busy filling a skip, and stripping wallpaper. We had 3 generations working together, aged 3-63. My mother, sister, and I spent hours stripping glue-soaked, vinyl 60s wallpaper. For most of that time, my 6 year old nephew showed amazing tenacity working alongside (and above us), before being "clean-it-up man" putting the wallpaper scraps into a wheelie bin and delighting in climbing into it wheelie bin to squash the paper down. His 3 year old sister joined in wielding the dustpan and brush.

It felt really good to be with family, helping family. I enjoyed it immensely, even as I spent hours balancing on a sink stripping wallpaper which seemed to have been attached with superglue.

I've written in the past how Bertie, my grandfather, was taken prisoner at Kalamata in Greece, and then transported by rail across Albania and Yugoslavia to the camp in the most atrocious conditions imaginable. Once in Austria, Granddad went out to work on farms (he was a dairy farmer at Te Rau-a-moa near Kawhia in civilian life) and helped build a hydro-electric power station at Lavamund. Although conditions were better in the camps than in the trucks, a Red Cross report of October 1941 reports that although the men now had adequate food, the state of clothing was unsatisfactory, their shoes were in a "lamentable condition" and few had socks. This did improve, and a Red Cross report from 1944 paints a much better picture.

At war's end Granddad had polio, but survived to travel back to England, marry my Grandmother (with whom he'd been writing via the Red Cross) They had a one week honeymoon before he travelled home on a troop ship, leaving her to follow on a ship full of war brides. They had my mother almost immediately. She and her brother grew up climbing trees, rowing on Kawhia Harbour, and helping their father catch whitebait.

Apparently, when I was born, he delighted in having a granddaughter, and told me how when summer came he'd take me to the sea, dangle my feed in the water and the crabs would bite my toes. Unfortunately later that year a brain tumour took hold, and come summer he was not himself, and he died a week before my first birthday.

The picture I get from my mother's stories is of a quiet, gentle man with a laid-back sense of humour, inherited by my brother and cousin.

He was in his 30s when he went to war and around 40 when my mother was born, and I get the impression that he and my grandmother, Marian, enjoyed their children. This year Mum told me how he'd take either her or her brother eel fishing at night (only one child at a time). He didn't live live long enough to meet his other 5 grandchildren, or his two (soon to be 3) great-grandchildren but I bet he would have enjoyed seeing us working all together yesterday.