by Derek Hansen
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Mum. Honestly, when Mum got that concerned look on her face no secret was safe. But what could I say? My friend Mack was a traitor to his country? He got picked up by a German submarine and didn’t tell anyone? And by not telling anyone put all the troops on the Queen Mary at risk? How could I tell her that? How could I tell her I’d just discovered my hero was flawed? What was worse was that I couldn’t remember what had started me crying in the first place. Ever since I’d left Mack the tears welling up inside me had been begging for an opportunity to get out. God only knows what triggered them. Under the circumstances I did the only thing I could do. I stormed off to the bathroom and locked the door. It was a favourite and much abused tactic of mine. My mother used to tell people I was highly strung but a lot of it was just an act.
I don’t think Mack stopped to think of the impact his confession would have on me. For most New Zealanders the war had been a case of absence and heartache. New Zealand hadn’t seen any fighting at close quarters, sending its troops over to the other side of the world to fight in Greece, North Africa and Italy. Despite the fact that the New Zealand military suffered the highest casualty rate of any country in the Empire, the war didn’t come to New Zealand. The closest it came to an invasion was playing host to hundreds of thousands of mostly polite, mostly frightened American boys preparing to battle their way to Tokyo.
On the other hand the Germans had set out to get me the very day I was born. I was supposed to have been born on D-Day. One week before I was due the street next to us was flattened. We had our windows blown in and walls cracked. My mother thought her best friend had been killed because her house was reduced to rubble. It turned out her friend was away visiting, nevertheless my mother got one hell of a shock and as a result my birth was delayed an extra week. I don’t think Mum wanted to bring another child into a world that was so fraught with peril.
My earliest memories are of Rod throwing Nigel and me under a reinforced table every time a plane flew over. He did it to Nigel when we were evacuated to Bootle in Cumberland the week after I was born. Rod wasn’t even five years old. It brought home the terror of the Blitz to my northern aunties and broke their hearts. He did it to me when I was old enough and was still doing it in 1948 when we arrived in Auckland. He kept on doing it for at least another twelve months. I clearly remember Rodney freaking out the first time my father took us to visit a park in our new strange land. Rod found an unexploded bomb. He grabbed hold of Nigel and tried to rip me out of my father’s arms to drag us both to safety. It took my father and several bystanders ages to convince my terrified older brother that the unexploded bomb was just a broken, abandoned, motorcycle sidecar.
The war never left us alone. Among the surviving essays is one I wrote about my Uncle Vic. We had to write an essay titled ‘Saved by the Skin of My Teeth’. The idea was to teach kids how to write drama. Some wrote about nearly being caught while raiding orchards, others about falling into the deep end of swimming pools and more than a third wrote corny essays with them being captured by Indians or King Kong and ‘waking up and discovering it had all been a dream’. I wrote about my Uncle Victor who’d sailed out to New Zealand on the same old tub as us.
The ship was the Arawa, a converted refrigerated meat carrier. Uncle Vic wasn’t really an uncle, simply a family friend. We were taught to call him Uncle just as we called other family friends Uncle or Aunt. Given that we had no blood relatives in the country, this arrangement worked well in providing us with the sort of extended family other people take for granted. But getting back to Uncle Vic. He’d been an ack-ack gunner at the London Docks. The docks were the Luftwaffe’s favourite target and hard to miss as the River Thames led the bombers right to them. Uncle Vic liked to tell how he arrived late one evening at his battery just as the bombers were lining up to drop their load. He sat on a little steel seat and worked the handle controlling the gun’s sideways movement. This particular night he arrived so late he made a hash of hooking on the strap which acted as a backrest. Given that he had to lean back and watch the searchlight beams in case they picked up a bomber, this was a pretty critical oversight. The inevitable happened. The gun barrel tilted up, he leaned back on his strap, the strap gave way and Uncle Vic toppled back into the Thames. He knew how to swim but had his tin hat, overcoat and boots on, and was flat tack just trying to keep his head above water. He screamed blue murder but his screams were lost in a hail of exploding bombs. Uncle Vic reckoned he was all but drowned by the time he got rid of his heavy clothing and virtually unconscious from the cold by the time he was picked up. When his rescuers asked him what gun he was on everyone went silent. Within seconds of him toppling into the Thames his battery had taken a direct hit. Uncle Vic was the only survivor. I was asked to read my essay out in front of the class—exactly the sort of dramatic story my pals loved.
The point is that Uncle Vic’s story was just one of many told and retold over the dinner table. The war was over but not yet done with. It dominated the movies we saw, the books and comics we read and the games we played. On rainy days you could usually find Gary and me down at Eric’s, under his house, flying an old battered sofa to Dresden. For us it was a Lancaster bomber. Eric wanted to be a pilot when he grew up so he always sat at the front with the broken shaft of a garden rake for a joystick and earphones from a discarded crystal set jammed on his head. Gary sat in the middle staring at an old street map stuck beneath a pane of glass salvaged from a picture frame. He was the bomb aimer. I was the tail gunner and my weapon was a garden fork. Let me tell you, the four prongs of that garden fork shot down more Me-110s than Fighter Command ever did. The war may have ended but we still lived it every day.
Having been born in 1944 I was obviously too young to remember anything about the war, but Rodney’s actions every time a plane had flown over and dinner table conversation had made sure it was kept current. Mack’s encounter with the submarine happened sixteen years earlier but it might just as well have been yesterday. His secret burned inside me and tears alone couldn’t douse the flames.
That night I lay awake wondering what I could do to change things. I was addicted to happy endings and the end of his story was anything but happy. I mulled over what he’d told me, desperately trying to think how events could be reinterpreted so that he emerged with his hands clean. It was too much to expect him to come out of it as a hero but I figured there must be some way he could at least be spared being branded a traitor. But no matter how I worked over the story the fact remained that Mack had failed in his duty. He had kept his word to his enemy and had to be respected for that, but by not reporting the U-boat he’d placed his obligations to the enemy above his duty and put all the soldiers aboard the troopship at risk. I couldn’t think of a soul who wouldn’t damn Mack for what he did.
I desperately needed to talk to someone. But who?
Some kids would automatically take their troubles to their dad but for me that wasn’t an option. My father was a man of firm convictions acquired around the shipyards of no-nonsense Tyneside. His sense of what was right and what was wrong never wavered. Right was right, wrong was wrong, and you were a fool if you thought otherwise. There were never mitigating circumstances or grey areas. His opinions were fixed by the experiences of others and by the dictates of authorities, and he never saw reason to challenge them or waste a moment of his life reconsidering. He didn’t lie, cheat, steal or take advantage of the less fortunate and was unforgiving of those who did. He still hadn’t forgiven the Germans for what they did during the war; his views on them had a lot in common with John Wayne’s attitude towards Indians. As far as my dad was concerned, the only good German was a dead German, and the best German was one that was good and dead. He could never accept that a promise made to ‘Jerry’ could be binding. Never. I couldn’t conceive of any circumstance where he’d have the slightest sympathy for Mack.
Rod was another obvious choice because he tended to be the oracle I consulted, but I couldn’t guaran
tee he wouldn’t discuss Mack with my father. Mum was ruled out for the same reason.
I thought about talking to Captain Biggs up at the Church Army. Captain Biggs was an unlikely hero to us kids and especially to me. A big man with a big heart and a jaw so square and firm it made Dick Tracy look like a chinless wonder, he devoted at least half his time to keeping us off the streets and providing moral guidance. Some of the tougher kids said he was a bit namby-pamby but stopped short of calling him a poof. Despite his size, he wasn’t the type you’d expect to pack down in a scrum but, equally, there was never the slightest suggestion that he kicked with the other foot. Parents had no hesitation releasing their sons into his care when he took us away for ten-day holidays on Waiheke Island. We went to a place called Camp Jasper on Oneroa Beach and, let me tell you, those holidays were the highlight of our childhood. Captain Biggs was a pillar of moral rectitude and one of the most respected members of our community, right up there with the school headmaster and Dr Satyanand, our local doctor.
Somewhat fortuitously, Captain Biggs never once mentioned his family or his past. As he wasn’t the sort of person we would automatically be drawn to, his silence on his background gave us the opportunity to create one for him, one that made him more acceptable. We surreptitiously questioned him and drew conclusions from his evasiveness. On the basis of no evidence whatsoever we managed to convince ourselves he was hiding the fact that he was the son of a prostitute who had abandoned him and he’d been raised in an orphanage. In our eyes being the son of a prostitute gave him more kinship with us and made him more acceptable.
Captain Biggs was well credentialed as a confidant on a number of scores. Mack was a member of his congregation and had become a tireless worker at church fetes and fundraisers. Captain Biggs had also played a major role in dragging Mack out of his alcoholic haze following the death of his wife. But while I really liked Captain Biggs, his candidacy had a couple of major flaws. I wasn’t looking for sympathy but for a solution. My big worry was that Captain Biggs would simply pray for forgiveness for Mack when what was needed was exoneration. Besides, Captain Biggs would see it as his pastoral duty to discuss the whole business with Mack. I couldn’t allow that. Mack would never forgive me. I was smart enough to realise that if Mack had wanted a heart-to-heart with Captain Biggs he would already have had one. Reluctantly I had to rule Captain Biggs out.
I ruled out Mr Grainger, my schoolteacher, and the headmaster. There were no secrets in school. We all knew which kids had been thumped by their fathers even before we saw the bruises, whose dad was assisting the police with their enquiries and which kids were being taken out of school and sent away to health camps, often about the same time as the victims themselves. We all knew who was in trouble for shoplifting, who’d been caught smoking and who’d been nailed for putting Mighty Cannons in people’s letterboxes and blowing them to bits. In school there were no secrets and a secret as big as Mack’s didn’t stand a chance.
I couldn’t tell my pals for much the same reasons, not even Eric to whom I told just about everything, and especially not Gary, whose father’s ship had been torpedoed. Their reaction would have been the same as mine had been when Mack had first begun his story. How could I expect Eric, Gary or any of my pals to keep a secret like that? Mack’s secret would’ve become the talk of the school, the suburb, the city, the country. Once out there’d be no stopping it. I knew for a fact my pals would race over to Mack’s place and hang off his front fence, just hoping to catch a glimpse of him. Seeing the man who’d seen a U-boat was the next best thing to seeing the submarine itself. How could I possibly inflict that on Mack?
I mentally rolled through the names of the fathers of all the boys I knew. I really liked Eric and Maxie’s dad—he was my third-favourite dad after my own and Gary’s—but he was out before he made it to the crease. He was half-Samoan but wholly Samoan in the way he encouraged family conversations. I really envied the way Eric’s entire family used to gather in the big room at the end of the hallway and discuss whatever was the issue of the day. His mother and elder sisters would iron and fold washing while they chatted. They’d talk about anything from cry-baby Johnny Ray’s latest single to which code of football had the toughest players. They always had a lot of laughs and each member of the family kept in touch with what the others were doing. There were no secrets in that big, wonderful room and that was the problem. There were no secrets. How could I let Mack’s secret loose in there?
One by one I dismissed the other fathers. When it came down to it, they all shared the same set of beliefs as my father. Too many New Zealanders remained behind in the sands of the Western Desert and graveyards in Italy and Greece, too many wounds had yet to heal. There was still a lot of animosity towards the Germans. I couldn’t see any of them forgiving Mack for what he’d done.
Of course the dad I most wanted to confide in was Gary’s. I think Mr Gillespie would’ve made a great teacher. He seemed to genuinely enjoy talking to us kids and we liked talking to him, opening up to him like steamed pipis. We told him things we never told other adults and we knew he’d never tell on us. That was one of the great things about him. Mr Gillespie was one of those cheery, affable people who throw themselves wholeheartedly into the community, without whom schools, churches, sports clubs and old people’s homes would struggle to raise money. I would’ve loved to talk to him about Mack but I had to rule him out. For one brief moment I thought his connection with U-boats might provide some common ground, but common sense prevailed. Why would someone who’d nearly been killed by a German submarine have any sympathy for a fellow countryman who’d let one get away? The horrible thought occurred to me that Mack’s submarine might have been the one that had eventually sunk his ship. As affable as Mr Gillespie was I couldn’t see him getting a laugh out of that.
Inevitably and mercifully, I fell asleep. Sleep played a much more important role back then than it does now. Sleep brought an end to the day as emphatically as a ruled line across a page. The expression ‘things will look better in the morning’ was a tenet of faith. Christmas, birthdays, illness, deaths and other catastrophic events like divorces aside, each day was a clean sheet of paper. That’s how it usually happened. But for once when I awoke, sleep had been no more than a semi-colon, a pause between thoughts. My concerns for Mack and the secret I carried picked up where I’d left them the night before. I needed some way to unburden myself, a way that God would approve and Mack allow. Fortunately, I got embroiled in the usual rush to have breakfast and get to school before the bell. But the distraction didn’t last. Mack’s secret sat with me through arithmetic and spelling. I was warned twice for not paying attention and threatened with the strap if I let my attention continue to wander.
Lunchtime brought relief of a kind. My acceptance as a Kiwi was always under constant review. Nigel and I were always being tested and had to prove our worth. One of our most challenging after-school expeditions was exploring an underground storm drain. This ranked among the most stupid and dangerous things we ever did. We all knew that just because it wasn’t raining where we were didn’t mean it wasn’t raining somewhere else in the drain’s catchment area. We all knew about flash flooding and the consequences of being caught in the tunnel when a wall of water came through, but not even that deterred us.
The danger was a large part of the attraction but there was something else as well. To get into the drain we had to use crowbars or steel rods borrowed from tool sheds to lever up the manhole cover. The cover was cast iron, around two and a half foot in diameter, probably five inches thick and inset into the shaft’s concrete and steel capping. It took at least three of us to lift the cover high enough to slide it away from the shaft. Now here’s the thing: we came to regard the manhole cover as the hatch in the conning tower of a submarine. The shaft continued the illusion. It sat about two foot above ground but dropped about six foot into the roof of the drains. That made the shaft roughly the height of a conning tower. To get into the drain, we had to clim
b down steel rungs set into the wall of the shaft and that really set our imaginations going; we’d seen rungs like that on submarines in movies. Once inside it, the storm drain was like an oval tunnel with concrete walkways on each side. The walkways were about two foot wide and sloped into a half-pipe-shaped drain just over three foot wide and two foot deep. There was never a time when this central waterway didn’t run with water. Overall the tunnel was just over nine foot at its widest and just under eleven foot from top to bottom. In short, it was about the same shape and size as we imagined the inside of a submarine to be.
None of us had any idea where this storm drain began although we knew it ended in Coxs Creek, which cut through mud flats out into the upper harbour about a mile away. We’d never had the guts to venture more than fifty yards along. Even that took some courage. By then we couldn’t see our hands in front of our faces unless we looked back towards the shaft, which provided the only light. We were as scared of someone putting the manhole cover back in place while we were underground and plunging us into total darkness as we were of hearing a flood of water rushing towards us. The drain was the most frightening place we ever went and we were always mightily relieved to get back up into daylight and not ‘end up in Coxs Creek’. The presumption, which was fair enough, was that if we did we’d be dead. ‘Ending up in Coxs Creek’ became a euphemism for getting killed or into serious trouble. Whatever we were doing we had to be careful or we’d end up in Coxs Creek. It was the ultimate threat but the experience was magical and we felt brave as all hell afterwards.
Depending upon which war movie we’d seen last, the drains were either a U-boat, a Jap sub or an American submarine. For some reason they were never British. I think if any of our parents thought we were even thinking about going down into that drain, or any drain, they would’ve given us the hiding of our lives. If they’d found out we’d actually been down into it they would’ve killed us.