Grandad was a writer...

Well, team, I did what I promised when I wrote my blog last nite. Okay, not in the order I'd planned (I was going to do writing for one of my own projects before doing anything else), but after a full and productive and fun day doing other things, this evening I finally started typing up the letters Grandad wrote back to his friend Oxley during WWII.

Our family only saw these letters for the first time shortly after we buried Grandad this year, and they are significant because they are written by him, in the handwriting that I've seen on Christmas gift tags, Birthday cards, letters, forms and envelopes all my life. Because they're all handwritten, I took some time typing them up so they're easier to read and to share with the rest of the whanau. I've been doing some other transcribing since I've been here in Australia, but the other letters I've typed up and are now filed as .docx documents on my laptop and on a backup memory stick were written by Hamuera, Grandad's father, and they were the letters I'd found in Adelaide.

This evening I remembered sitting next to cousin Mark on the big couch in Auntie Jill's lounge just a few weeks ago, reading the letters for the first time, voicing them aloud into a room full of relatives, realising what a gift - a real gift - they were going to be. Tonight it was time to type Grandad's letters, and as I worked on them, zooming and times and reading aloud at others, decoding and mentally unwrapping the letters where words were tricky to decipher, I realised something about Grandad. Grandad's writing is vivid, funny, compelling. He's a writer.

The letters are all written by Grandad while he was with the 28th Maori Battalion, written from Papakura at the training camp and also from overseas. They describe war, sure, but they also describe a young Maori man who was experiencing war and, necessarily but poignantly alongside, life in all of its complexity. There are hilarious anecdotes about drinking and late nite haka sessions on the ship and ordering beer in Cairo at a classy establishment which didn't stoop to such beverages, and there are acknowledgements of death and fear and the moment of hearing his elder brother my Uncle Paul had been killed. There is a long and moving section where he marvels at the gap between his university studies and the routine of military life. Beautifully written, evocative, rich, compelling, haunting in an uncliched sense of the word if there is one.  

Of course I'll go to bed tonite with a sense of regret: like so many times over the past weeks and months I'm struck by the length of the list of questions I wish I'd thought to ask when I had the chance. Now I have more questions, more wishes, but also more words.  And with more words, more insights.

I always knew thhat Grandad wrote. He wrote in Te Ao Hou, he wrote in birthday cards, and he wrote to apply to our trusts for crumbs of scholarship money for his grandchildren. It's not just that Grandad wrote, though: it's that Grandad was a writer. To give you a sense of what I'm talking about, my blog post tonight will finish not with my words but with his. In this letter, Grandad has just finished extolling the virtues of a mutual friend of himself and Oxley. 

"He was about 200 yds from me when the bomb struck his truck. We dashed over but he had died instantly. The Bn was on the move at the time and one of the saddest things of all in war happened here. A grave scooped out, a short prayer by the padre, a wooden cross and the whole show moved inexorably on. Nothing looks as forlorn as the pitiful little crosses that one comes across in the vast expanses of the desert. They seem to be the supreme expressions of loneliness, forlornness, and sadness."




(Note: Bn = Battalion)