Memories shared

More than 60 years since the world's biggest conflict put millions of men and women in uniform, the clubs and associations they formed after the war struggle to survive. The Taranaki branch of the Royal New Zealand Air Force Association might be one of those which doesn't.

Open to any ex-RNZAF, Commonwealth or Allied air forces members, the branch suffers from being isolated from former air bases and major airfields where former pilots and flight crew naturally settle.

Although counting more than 30 members on their books, many are in rest homes or hospitals, too frail or sick to participate in association activities.

In the past three months alone seven members have died.
Whether the Taranaki branch will continue in its current form was the subject of a special meeting held last week.

Seven members attended, bringing with them walking sticks, glasses, hearing aids and faces lined with memories.

Matt Rilkoff talked to three of them about their lives.

Samuel West

On Friday evenings Sam West meets with his regular group of ex-servicemen at the RSA for a beer or two before dinner.

The former Royal New Zealand Air Force flight sergeant chuckles about solving the world's problems that way, a common joke among men with time to fill and beer to drink.

Gentle and intelligently spoken, the Hawera-born man sits comfortably in his overstuffed armchair, his ankle a stripe of white between slippered feet and dark trousers.

As president of the Taranaki branch of the Royal New Zealand Air Force Association, much of the responsibility for finding a solution to the membership problem falls to him.

He is quietly pragmatic about the issue, which for many provokes sadness and dismay at a period of time falling from the nation's living memory.

"Its inevitable that we will amalgamate with another association. Whether that is this year or next, I'm not sure. But it's our only option. As these things operate now, even the RSA will have trouble in time."

Mr West left the Air Force in 1975, having joined as a 16-year- old aircraft apprentice in 1951.

His first posting was to England where citizens still carried ration cards and bomb craters dotted the cities. He met his wife Doris there, and made lifelong friends.

His time in England was as close as he came to the world war, to the type of aggression he was trained to mete out and defend against. For a long time, association members like Mr West, those who were not veterans of World War II, were a minority. Now they are the only hope for its survival.

Without young ex-RNZAF members the association will continue its decline.

"Oh, it's changed all right. We used to make trips, overnight trips or longer. We used to have dances and everyone would stay out late at night. Now our members prefer lunch and we don't get many along to that either. So many are in rest homes or in hospital. Most people accept that is the way these sort of clubs go," he said.

The problem for the Taranaki branch is geographical. Pilots and ground crew tend to live in bigger cities where larger airports and services offer employment. Mr West himself lived in Auckland when he worked for Air New Zealand after leaving the air force. He moved to Bell Block only when he retired.

The presidency came Mr West's way because of his age. At 74 he's younger than the people he has been charged with organising for the past few years. Sometimes he wishes he had those years the other members own.

"If I had been five or 10 years older I would have been living in a better period than today. Life was more settled, people were more communicative. They knew what was wrong, what was right."

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William Edhouse

Freshly demobilised WWII veteran Bill Edhouse slept through his train stop, arrived in New Plymouth and decided to stay.

It's a polished story, worn smooth by telling and one of many age and experience have equipped him with.

There is the tale of bunking school at Ohakune to peer at planes from the bushes, of Kingsford Smith and the barnstormers, of white coated "spies" at a wartime plywood factory and the Chinese family that helped his own survive the Great Depression.

They are a spiderweb of history and now and then there is a strand about the Pacific, a place he first knew as a venue for war against the Japanese.

It was there he served as a gunner, radio operator and almost any other job required except flying the PV1 Ventura bombers of his squadron.

His face, unlined and smiling, peaks out from history books he owns.

In these photos he is a young man meeting the governor general with the rest of his aircrew on an island airfield captured from the Japanese.

Pointing to the insignia on the bomber's wings he has another story to tell.

"You can see our roundels don't have the white lines on them yet. At that time the Yanks were shooting at anything that looked like a red circle, like the Japanese. They were trigger happy. They shot at anything that moved."

He should know. At one time his plane very nearly came under attack from two American P-38 Mustang fighters planes who mistook it for a Japanese bomber.

"They came in so fast. They were there and then they were gone and they must have been going at a rate because for an instant I could see the vapour trails coming off their wingtips. You get those at higher altitudes but when they came at us we were low so they must have been just thundering."

From time to time he makes promises to get back to the topic he agreed to talk about - the Airforce Association - but there are memories and distractions everywhere.

"When I applied for the air force I got a telegram telling me to report to Te Kuiti at oh-nine- fifteen. I asked my father "what's this oh-nine-fifteen". We didn't know about any 24 hour clock," he laughs.

Then he laughs again recalling his father's advice. "Ask the post office, they'll know."

The next telegram confused them just the same, telling the 18-year-old to report to Ohakea "forthwith" a word, like the time before, he had never heard.

He asked his father what would happen if he went "without".

"Ask the post office," he said. "Ask the post office."

There is no doubt his children have heard the story, his grandchildren too. Like the one about his arrival in New Plymouth, it has the good humour and timing of a well practised skit. Though his squadron did not lose a man in the theatre of war, they did not escape unscathed.

During training one of their pilots lost control of the Tiger Moth he was flying, slammed into the side of a shop and was killed.

"We all got airborne straight away. It was what we did. It was the way to make sure nobody lost their nerve."

He pauses, takes a bite of his cracker.

"These are all just memories coming out. You work them in to make them fit."

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Lorna Sarten

Before her own war, a young Lorna Sarten knew Anzac Day simply as the one when her brother got a birthday cake.

Now each year the former WAAF rises at 5am for the dawn ceremony to see children wear the medals their grandparents won in a war so devastating it changed the world forever.

"That makes me smile when I see them wearing those medals. It is really special to me to see that," she says.

The 86-year-old enlisted in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force in 1941 at Bell Block. Just months later she was in Wellington training as a cook at Rongotai airfield dealing with the massive quantities of food to feed 2000 airmen.

"We used to fry eggs in a pan that was about two feet long. It was half an inch deep with fat and we'd start cracking eggs in at one end and by the time we got to the end we'd be going back and taking the first ones out."

While civilians were dealing with rationing, there were no such restrictions on the fighting men and women, some of whom saw opportunity in the excess.

She recalls her "battleaxe" boss at the base and the fate of a bacon and egg pie.

"I had to make it for an exam and I know she took it to the guards to keep them sweet so they would not search her bags when she left. There was food in them, of course."

Like other ex-servicemen and women Mrs Sarten remembers the friendships of that time, the bond their common experience gave them. Despite the horrifying reason behind their mobilisation, the memories are happy ones.

There were the weekly dances, the trips to town in their civilian clothes and the innocent flirting with the young men preparing to fight.

"We did not even think about them maybe dying. We did not want to think about it and no one wanted to talk about it . . . I knew a man from a flying boat that had been shot down. I knew him very well and when I heard he had died that made me think about it. That brought it home to me as to what it was all about."

She says she knows of a few other ex-WAAFs in New Plymouth but there may be more. To her, meeting with these women who share similar memories is not a time for nostalgia. They never talk of their war.

"It's just that contact we enjoy," she says. "The chance to chat with people."

By MATT RILKOFF - Taranaki Daily News 25-4-09