She was on a ship. My Welsh mother. Leaving Egypt and coming to New Zealand. She wasn’t coming home and the war still had another few months to run and a few hundred thousand souls to take. She had ‘pulled strings’ she said, to leave her job as a Territorial Army Nurse, before the war had actually ended. With barely a day’s notice she was on a ship to cross to the other side of the world. Of course it was because of a man. My father. Obviously he wasn’t my father at that stage. Married for two years they had hardly seen each other since the wedding in the desert and the honeymoon on a houseboat on the Nile. Both in their late thirties, they knew that time was running out. My father had been injured and invalided home to New Zealand earlier, and now she was on her way to reunite and begin the family she so desperately wanted.
How well did she know this man for whom she was leaving everything she knew and everyone she held dear? Many letters had passed between them. They kept them all. I read them when I was a teenager. I thought they were quite boring. They said time and time again how much they missed each other and longed to be together again. I suppose I was wanting something more, well – poetic, but Dad was just a farmer who had left school at twelve to milk the family’s cows and break in the farm. Perhaps I was expecting a bit much. More interesting was the letter I found from my mother to her sister saying that she had news. She was engaged. And it wasn’t to Jim, whom she had been writing about regularly, but to Godfrey, a Kiwi. A whirlwind romance? In the desert? That didn’t seem likely considering he didn’t have a lot to say. My mother recounted how she would be on night duty, working at a table in the middle of the ward, injured men sleeping all-around her, whilst she wrote up the medical notes. And then, having slept all day, he would come and sit beside her. Saying nothing. Just sitting. And watching. Disconcerting for her. She asked, “What are you thinking about?” Very direct, he told her. “I’m just wondering how you’ll transplant to New Zealand.”
So now she was being transported so that the transplanting could take place. Among strangers. One day on the ship she was approached by some of the homegoing New Zealand Maoris, whose fierce fighting in the desert had been legendary. “Come with us,” they urged her. “Do not be afraid.” As well she might have been when they performed their fearful haka for her. “We just want to honour Godfrey’s woman,” they told her.
When the ship arrived in Auckland it sat out in the harbour. Docking was delayed as it was feared that there was smallpox onboard. Thankfully a false alarm. She didn’t have to wait long for the reunion. Godfrey did not have many words but he was up and on to the ship and within minutes found her in a corridor. As she went into his arms, she said, the years of separation melted away.
What happened was... 