“So Rex what did you get up to after the war?”
“The CO called me aside one day said, there’s someone wants to talk to you. Turns out a senior woman from the Red Cross wanted volunteers to work for them now that things had settled down in Italy and the war was coming to an end in the rest of Europe. Most of the other guys were keen to get home, be with their families etc. Well I hung about for a bit. I got to do some work traveling around, writing reports being their eyes and ears.”
“I was living with an opera singer on the top floor of a hotel in Milan. I had an old jeep with no tyres we’d drive around on the cobble stone streets, on days off. You could hear us coming for miles. Rubber for tyres just wasn’t available, not unless you had contacts with some important people anyway.”
One day we left Milan by plane and flew to an airfield somewhere in Austria. The stories had started about the camps and we were to inspect a camp in Austria near the German Border some town called Linz. We could smell the place before we got within two miles. Reminded me of home, the freezing works stench, the smell of blood and bone. It was disgusting, you’ve never seen anything like it. Walking dead skeletons on their feet, I never saw anything like it ever again.
The whole of Europe was dangerous, there were drunken men armed to the teeth and used to killing. Manning check points, no discipline, no orders, no command and in lots of cases no English, the Red Cross badge saved my skin many times.
There were bands of orphaned kids roaming the streets in Italy, stealing whatever they could to stay alive. They caught and burnt a US soldier one day. We were shown his remains in the morgue tent, they’d got him and set him alight with tyres and alcohol stolen from the sub base. They’d get drunk on the alcohol, they’d steal it and be out of control.
We were under orders not to go out alone. I got seperated from my mates when we were out in the town one night.
This band of kids cornered me, I had nowhere to go but up a base perimeter fence. My dress jacket lapel got caught in the barbed wire at the top. They were pulling at my feet trying to drag me down. I saw a picture of that American’s body in the morgue tent.
I found my Mausa in my pocket and emptied a magazine down towards the crowd. There were some yelps and screams I never looked back I tore my jacket getting over and ran…..
“You remember that sub the escort ships sunk on the way to Italy?”
“Yeah I think I do, we rescued the survivors they took them on board our tub kept them in the brig”
“Well you remember the guy with the scar on his head and wearing the white jersey?”
“Big guy, scar head we called him”
“Yep that’s the one”
“I saw him get on the bus one day in Newmarket”
“Bloody hell”
“Yep he must have been a Yugoslavian or something a lot of them came to New Zealand after everything was done there”
“I stayed on long enough to take care of the Italian women giving birth to babies from NZ troops, there were a few of them”
“I got the call that the last ship was departing Italy and if I wanted to be on board I better get my arse down there, after that I’d have to pay for my own passage home”
“I had two pillow cases stuffed with Lira, I was a Lira millionaire. By the time I got to Naples, the Yanks had stopped exchanging money so I was stuck with it. I gave a pillow case full to the nuns and kept the rest for supplies on board the ship home”
I got a job with the hospital in Middlemore which was a troop hospital built by the Yanks, it wasn’t far from my house I got to ride the bike there.The bloody BSA Bantam I’d left under the house, started third kick with a fresh tank of gas.
As I was the welfare officer I got to organise all the activities and took care of the needs of the patients.
One Friday I was asked for some apples by a guy with two broken legs. He seemed ok to me, he wanted all the apples I could get. I got him a case, thought he must be having visitors or giving them to other patients.
Well bugger me but he ate the bloody lot. Matron called me into her office on Monday.
“Carter!” she said “that bloke with the broken legs was from the mental hospital, he ate all those apples and blew up like a balloon.”
He had to go have his stomach pumped. He kept half the ward awake with his crunching and munching and moaning in agony.
There were apples cores everywhere under the mattress, on the floor, out the window, in his bedside drawers, under the pillows, in the pillow cases…..
I took a bunch of psychiatric patients out to the beach, bloody buggers they stole a group of school girl’s clothes when they went swimming, stuck them in the compartment on the back of the bus where the spare tyre went. One of them stole a case of sardines from the local store, sat in the back of the bus eating every can….there were cans everywhere, what was it about these people and food?
I showed movies on Rotoroa Island, Alkytrazz they called it. The men on one island, the women on the other. Blokes would drown swimming across the strait between islands. They’d make booze out of anything, drink aftershave, anything.
But the best time I got to organise was when we were expecting some nurses fresh from England.
I had two cases of oranges that had some mould growing on them. I phoned the supplier at Turners and Growers. He arranged to send another two cases and suggested I just dump the spoilt cases of oranges.
As I’d got word that the nurses would be arriving off the boat in three months I had time to organise some punch and the oranges would be perfect.
Booze in those days was expensive and hard to get, the six oclock swill, gave license to sly boozers and people selling moonshine in the streets. An infamous character would be in Vulcan lane wearing a big white coat. Inside the coat were his concoctions “Ye Old Panther’s Piss” and it tasted like it.
It’d never do, it was expensive and kicked like a horse. I eyed the oranges and came up with a plan. I found two broken agitator washing machines in the stores and dismantled them so I could use the bowls for brewing my Orange Punch.
I stuck some cork in the holes where the agitators and pump drain holes used to be and set to work. A case of oranges in each bowl and a sack of sugar.
Left to ferment for three months they’d make an excellent brew and it was with-in our meagre budget.
I asked a mate who was a doctor to try the finished product, “This’ll never do Rex, here” he said and wrote out a script. “Stick two of these in each one”
He handed me a prescription and I took it to the pharmacy.
Four half gallon flasks of medical alcohol, I stirred two into each brew.
What a concoction, we were blind the lot of us.
And I had to drive the bus, it was ok picking the thirty or so nurses up from the nurses home at Green Lane. The drive to Middlemore was uneventful, but the return journey….
I had some problems right at the start, there seemed to be something wrong with the back of the bus, as I reversed, the gear box seemed to not want to move but the motor was ok.
Finally getting into the gates at the entrance to Green Lane was a challenge someone had erected some stone pillars which I didn’t remember being there when I’d picked them up that evening. The bus didn’t want to fit through the gap. The nurses decided to get out and walk the last 200 yards to their quarters, falling over, laughing, singing, they certainly enjoyed the night out.
Driving the bus back to Middlemore I noticed two blokes arguing by the bus parking area. One had a yellow Morris Eight or something with a big dent in the front. He was yelling at this other bloke saying he must of done it and the other bloke was denying it.
I scratched my head and parked the bus around the corner. There were traces of yellow paint on the back of the bus where the patients had stowed those girls clothes that day. I wondered how the hell it got there….
Three months later I got called into matrons office again. She was red faced and fuming….
“Carter!!”
“Yes Matron?”
“Those thirty or so nurses from England, that you boys put the dance on for”
“Yes matron”
“Well fourteen of them are pregnant” (It wasn’t me)
“Really matron?” nothing about a dented Morris Eight or the gouges down the side of the bus were ever mentioned.
Life after that just got routine I guess, I never did join an RSA or anything. Too many old boys just sitting about getting drunk, talking about over there. Bugger that, I was home I wanted to get on with it.
I did a lot of hunting and fishing, got married four times, had four kids. Started businesses, made a fortune, lost a fortune, made another one.
Two divorces, one wife died.
The last wife she’d sunbathe on the front deck of the boat, when we went out fishing in the Manukau. We sold that place on the bay and moved north. It was a good life.
“So how come you look so good anyway Billy? And you still got the uniform”
“I never got home Rex”
“Aye?”
“I stayed right here”
“Here?”
“Over there mate”
“What?”
“You remember that bunker that night you got up for a pee?”
“The moonshine?”
“Yep your bloody moonshine”
“I was blown off my feet by a shell dropping near by”
“Yeah mate, nearby ok right between me and Cyril”
“Aye, I came to and you were gone”
“That’s right mate, we never got out of Egypt”
“What about the viaduct and the dance with the nurses, the DC3, the Jerry shooting us up, the bloody still getting destroyed in the fighting in Monte Casino??”
“That was all you Rex”
“Really?”
“Yep really, you kept me alive all that time, talking to me telling stories about me, to your mates, your kids.”
“I’ll be”
“Yeah mate, that’s what it means to live forever I guess”
“Well until someone stops blaming all the sheenanigans on someone else I suppose”
“Yep I suppose”
“So this place then? The plastic chairs, the flourescent lighting, the magazines, the warm tea, is it some sort of hospital waiting room? Because I’ve had it with hospitals mate”
“I think Rex, that it’s purgatory”
“Purgatory?”
“Yeah you know the Catholic thing”
“But I don’t believe in any of that”
“Ah but your kid does”
“Aye? my kid”
“Yeah the youngest one, the one you warned about smoking that stuff from the back yard”
“Look this purgatory bullshit it doesn’t exist”
“So then where the hell are we then?”
“I’d say we’re living in that kid’s head, like you had me living in your head all those years”
“Well I couldn’t leave you there mate”
“You didn’t mate there was no body to ship home and when you got out of hospital, they shipped you off to Italy”
“Where’d they bury you Billy?”
“You don’t listen do you? I’d like to say Inver bloody Cargill mate, but there was nothing to bury after that shell, I was spread around the desert that night”
“Bloody hell sorry about that”
“Would have been you too mate, but for your bloody moonshine and your weak bladder”
“I died in Dargaville of all places.
The jokes I told about Dargaville when I was traveling.”
“They buried me on a hill in an RSA plot…”
“You joined the RSA afterall?”
“Yeah I got bored and they played bowls, I had customers there”
“Customers?”
“Hearing Aids, I sold hearing Aids”
“What?”
“I designed and built hearing aids…”
“Aye?”
“I sold…….Oh never mind….”
Crash writes a river 