by Bruce Ansley
Von Luckner’s men may have left a ghostly residue. Three German prisoners twice attempted to escape from Somes in World War II, first by stealing the lighthouse keeper’s dinghy, then later by sailing on a raft of empty oil drums using — shades of von Zatorski! — a beautifully made sextant of scrap wood. This fine instrument is now under glass in the island’s visitors’ centre.
While on Ripapa von Luckner grizzled to Sir James Allen, Minister of Defence, whom he saw as his social equal among lowly Kiwis. He complained that he and Kircheiss shivered in the easterly and cowered in the southerly and slept under newspapers padding their bedclothes. ‘This is scarcely imaginable for educated men,’ he wrote to Allen, who agreed. The Germans got the woolly underwear they asked for and in May 1918 were sent back to balmy Motuihe as a bonus, although they lived in considerably more straitened conditions than before. On their way back they spent a night locked up in the Chippy’s Shop, the carpenter’s room in the Torpedo Bay base. It is there still, now kitted out as a wardroom and much more to the Germans’ taste.
Von Luckner returned to New Zealand in 1938 to mixed reviews. Some thought him a spy for a government intent on conquering much of the world. Many others cheered him. The Australian military later claimed they knew all along the Count was a Nazi agent, although he’d been feted by that nation’s social elites.
New Zealanders were sometimes suspicious, more often cordial and frequently rapturous. Historians, notably James Bade, have produced evidence proving that his Pacific voyage was a propaganda journey not only encouraged but also financed by the Third Reich, in particular by Hitler’s propaganda head, Joseph Goebbels.
In return von Luckner praised Hitler’s policies while denying he was doing so. He had had nothing to do with politics, he claimed, and had not spread any Nazi propaganda. In the same breath he said he had not favoured the Nazis at first, but had changed his mind. In New Zealand he publicly applauded the invasion of a ‘corrupt’ Austria as ‘a powerful factor toward the peace of Europe’.
Von Luckner was greeted with rather more scepticism when he returned to Germany. Hitler’s government accused him of damning them with faint praise. He was told to shut up for the rest of the war, to go inside and close the door.
On balance, New Zealanders liked him. We were at the outer edge of our age of innocence. He was a gentleman raider. He hadn’t hurt anyone except for that lone sailor, and we were inclined to accept the view that the death was accidental. He was gallant and handsome. He’d made the authorities look like fools then starred in a ‘daring escape’ from Motuihe and that made him a hero to many.
They loved the aristocrat with the common touch.
A retrospective article by ‘A Local Lad’ in the Auckland Star in 1941 gave an account of one of the Count’s pub crawls: ‘I believe that New Zealanders . . . would not be so prone to regard him as a romantic character, a glamorous German, if they could have seen him setting forth . . . Poor Felix! When he went on the scoot (which was pretty often) he was worse off than the average husband making the most of a meagre allowance for beer. The Countess, who controlled the exchequer, usually handed him a florin.’ (‘“He drinks like a horse water [sic],” she would scream in moments of anger.’)
Often he would auction his cap in bars for funds. The Local Lad accompanied the Count on a tour of the country, reporting that Auckland businessmen fawned over him but also that, after being in close contact with him, ‘I cannot now believe he was the clever adventurer that he would have us believe.’
Newspapers also reported that the Count, who was sailing to New Zealand in his own yacht, the Seeteufal, ‘Sea Devil’, had called at Maupelia on the way. He claimed to have dug up money, gold, uncut diamonds and pearls he’d hidden there twenty-one years before, and sent perhaps £10,000 worth of buried treasure (he had no knowledge of the value of such things, he said) back to Germany. He would give no details to the avid reporters, whose bullshit detectors must have been stowed away that day. Desert island? Buried treasure? The essentials of any good South Seas romance. The evidence is that von Luckner did not land on Maupelia, much less dig up his loot.
The chief postal censor, who had read and translated many of von Luckner’s letters, responded to the Count’s claim that he’d been made a Maori chief by a Maori princess. The censor dubbed him ‘Baron Munchausen the Second’, the Baron being a fictional character who claimed to have ridden on a cannonball, fought a twelve-metre crocodile and flown to the moon. Officials seem to have been more direct and colourful then.
Apart from newspaper accounts and a lingering scepticism not very much else remains of that great adventure: a few relics in museums. Practical New Zealanders have eliminated the rest, pulled it down, grown it over, thrown it out and cleaned up.
Von Luckner died in Sweden, his wife’s home country, on 13 April 1966, aged eighty-four. His body was returned to Germany.
Oh, and what happened to the staunch old Moa, the captured scow that took the escaping Germans to the Kermadecs? She’s long gone too. A Greymouth newspaper in 1935 carried a small advertisement for the sale of a wreck: the Moa, carrying a cargo of timber-mill machinery, had become stranded while trying to cross the bar of the Wanganui River near Hari Hari south of Greymouth. It is a wild river on a dangerous coast. The bar was seldom used. It had silted up and the Moa’s crew realised, too late, that it was too shallow to cross. The ship stuck fast and was pounded by heavy seas. People came from Hari Hari and saved what they could but the Moa was lost. Her remains were sold at auction.
From this distance, what are we to make of von Luckner? Oh yes, he was a character, an entertainer, a great storyteller and a romancer. He was a Nazi sympathiser, at least. Perhaps he was a fool who rushed in. But there’s no doubting his courage, his abilities, his skill. His was a huge adventure.
A century on Aucklanders still recall him. I asked a dozen or so people at random what they remembered about him. ‘Romantic,’ they said. ‘Cavalier.’ The gentleman pirate.
There may be few physical reminders, but he left his mark.
15
Travelling first class
For a long time the notebook lay on my desk unopened, a small, oddly sized journal, somewhere between a diary and an exercise book. It had a mottled brown paper cover and the remnants of what looked like leaves stuck to the front.
Someone had given it to me at my father Hec’s hundredth birthday party. He didn’t make his century, for he died at seventy-six, but it seemed a good time for friends and family to celebrate his life. Old photographs, drawings, books, logbooks, school reports, fragile newspaper clippings and club minutes appeared — the things that people save because they say something about a person they loved.
I took the notebook home and put it on my desk. It disappeared in the clutter for months. And, in the course of one of those grim assaults on disorder which satisfy for a week or so before chaos triumphs again, it resurfaced.
I looked at it more closely. What was that mottling effect? Why, it seemed like grease. Like a brown paper bag after the pie has been taken out of it. And those leaves, now khaki, crumbling away from the paper. Surely they were, yes, lacebark, houhere. We had a big lacebark tree in the back yard of our parents’ home. Small boys could climb its smooth trunk and hide in its branches. It was a refuge, and the tree was obliging. We tore off pieces of bark and looked at the creamy lace beneath. The tree was forgiving, too.
The book measured 205 by 165 millimetres. Too big for a notebook. Every second page was blank. The pages in between were standard exercise-book format, with a red margin. Where would such a book have come from?
The answer to that, of course, is from long ago — from the days when everything was written down, and written by hand, the only alternative being a typewriter the size, complexity and price of a pocket battleship. (As for photographs, my big Kodak camera had a front door like a safe, from which unfolded a bellows outfitted with levers and distance rulers, which sometimes — rarely — got the subject in
focus but was not often used because the price of film and developing at the chemist’s was far beyond my sixpence-a-week pocket money.)
The opening page of the book revealed it was not a journal, but a log book. It was addressed, in yellow letters, outlined in red ink, to:
Mr N. Reeder
D.C. Kowhai District
Christchurch
It had a drawing of yellow kowhai flowers and their tiny leaves in the top right-hand corner, and below the address a picture of a resolute young fellow in broad-brimmed hat, long brown shorts, green, beautifully squared backpack and stave, marching beneath rounded brown hills. The D.C. stood for District Commissioner, of the Boy Scouts.
At the time the District Commissioner was more impressive than the Governor-General, closer to God even than cleanliness. We promised, on our honour, to do our duty to God and the Queen, and we thought omitting Mr Reeder from the list was a serious mistake on somebody’s part.
The inscription below the drawing announced that this was the Log of the First Class Journey made by Bruce Ansley, P.L. (patrol leader) of Karoro Patrol, Bishop Troop, following NZ Topographical Map S84, in the company of a boy called John.
The dates surprised me, for they covered only two days. I remembered that journey very well. It seemed to go on forever. It was wild, all right. At certain times on the route I was lost in space. It went on for weeks. Oh, all right, a week at the very least.
Two days? There must be some mistake.
I remembered the Karoro Patrol too. At the time I hoped that would go on forever. We were eight boys who did everything together: camps, hikes, bottle drives. We’d graduated from the Cubs. My mother Jess was the pack leader, the Akela. She gave us structure and purpose. She battled the chaos of her six children and had enough energy left over to help generations of others, for she gave much of her life to struggling kids.
The Cubs gave a two-fingered salute. This was before the two-fingered salute took on new meaning and became universal. Scouts used three fingers for their salute. This meant you had to join your thumb to your little finger. Some boys could do this easily. Others, like me, had to put their hands behind their back and surreptitiously join the two. What’s a boy without the three-fingered salute? Not a good Scout, that’s what. My hand still looks like a crow’s foot whenever I try.
Nor could I remember what hand to shake with. Scouts have a secret handshake: they shake with their left hands. Normal people shake with their right. Giving a good firm handshake is part of a man’s measure. Forgetting which is which is not a good start.
We lived by the Scout Law. We promised to be trustworthy and dependable, to tell the truth and, of course, to keep our promises.
We were to be true to family, Scout leaders, friends, school and nation.
We were to be helpful at all times, without pay or reward, friendly to all, respectful of difference, courteous and well-mannered, kindly and gentle, cheerful, thrifty, conservation-minded, brave in the face of danger, courageous in the teeth of injustice, clean in body and mind, reverent towards God yet respectful of others’ beliefs.
From the outside we were pimply, wavering thirteen-year-olds. Inside, we were paragons.
We in the Karoro Patrol promised to do our best, to do our duty to God and the Queen. We promised to obey orders without question, and even if we didn’t like them, to obey immediately, because that was our duty as Scouts.
We listened in awe to Bill Liddy, schoolteacher by day and Scoutmaster nights and weekends. Bill was the most popular schoolteacher in New Brighton and hence the whole world. He was defined by school and Scouts. When he fixed you with his level grey stare you knew you’d been outed, that he’d spotted the worm inside.
As a returned soldier he recognised the enemy. He called them the Skirt Brigade. They were a rival group to be feared and, eventually, they won. The Skirt Brigade made off with us, one by one, until we were lost to the Scouts forever.
In the meantime we undertook to be clean in thought, word and deed. The Founder, Baden-Powell, had declared, on the subject, that decent Scouts looked down upon silly youths who talked dirt, and did not let themselves give way to temptation. A Scout was pure, and clean-minded, and manly.
But that was a step too far. It was the first promise to go. We spent Sundays in a macrocarpa tree whose branches had matted into a kind of platform where we were invisible from the ground. We’d sit in a circle and wank and I can guarantee that not a single clean thought passed through our minds.
Our world at the time was constructed of staves. They were long manuka poles, stripped of bark and polished by use. Bishop Troop had dozens of them, perhaps hundreds. Naturally, we fought with them on every possible occasion, until Bill’s stare caught up with us. Then we built bridges, stretchers for evacuating the injured, complicated derricks for lifting things, ladders, walls, emergency shelters.
There was nothing you couldn’t do with manuka staves. We grew up believing the world a much better place for them. It was a manuka stave I’d pictured myself holding as I marched along the front page of my log, the happy wanderer with his knapsack on his back.
When we went on a Scout camp we built washing-up benches, plate racks, drying frames, clothes hangers, shoe shelves, platforms, dining tables and seats, all from manuka staves. We made kybos of them too. ‘Kybo’ was the Scout name for a dunny: Keep Your Bowels Open. You’d go behind a scrim screen held up by manuka poles, and sit gingerly upon a seat constructed of, yes, manuka poles, and there you’d be suspended above a malodorous hole in the ground. Naturally, this taught us everything we needed to know about knots, for a failed clove hitch, or a granny knot instead of a reef, or a dodgy sheep shank, could end in unspeakable disaster.
Reef knots don’t slip. Also, they lie flat, so that when someone broke their arm — scaling a mountainside, say — and you had to put their arm in a sling using your Scout scarf, you always used a reef knot. I still do the chant: ‘Left over right and under, right over left and under.’
A bowline doesn’t slip either, so it was the knot to use when, say, someone fell over a cliff when out hiking and you had to take the rope you always carried, construct a derrick from your staves, tie a loop using a bowline and lower yourself down after them. I still use the bowline-tying chant too: ‘The bunny comes out of the burrow, goes round the tree and dives back into the burrow.’
We had the bodies of stick insects but our hearts were of steel.
All of this was encased within our Scout uniform. Our uniforms were to us as the telephone box was to Clark Kent. We’d put them on and fly out transformed. Superman had a cape and a cozzie (tight, but Scout-like in that no untoward bulges showed).
We wore the Scout scarf in the colours of Bishop Troop, yellow and black. It was folded in such a way that each end presented a twist of colours, which should have come together in perfect Vs but seldom did. The two sides were held around the neck by the magnificently named woggle, usually made of plaited leather, although a rubber band was sometimes pressed into service. My own was made by my father from stag’s horn. A white lanyard, usually rather off-white, wound around the scarf.
By that time the military-looking lemon-squeezer, differing from the old diggers’ hats only in the creases in the crown (the Army had one crease to the front so the four were in a diamond pattern, Scouts in a square — or was it vice versa?), had vanished. A beret had taken its place.
We wore Scout belts with fleur-de-lis on the buckles. Our socks had ribbons attached to the gaiters. We had khaki-ish shorts and shirts with big pockets for carrying a compass, pocketknives, odd bits of lashing rope, bandages, maps, pencils, even the occasional handkerchief. Our shirts were adorned with ribbons and badges. The ribbons denoted Karoro Patrol. Somewhere on the shirt, the breast I think, was the famed fleur-de-lis, the Scout emblem. The badges told other Scouts everything they needed to know about the wearer.
There were badges for housekeeping, bushcraft, first aid, knot-tying. There were, in fact, badges for every
thing, and so many of them that a truly diligent Scout could end up looking like a pine tree at Christmas, hung with so many baubles, bits and pieces that he glittered, which, of course, was the whole point. A Scout’s badges were the measure of the boy who wore them. The more badges, the more worthy.
Among the most coveted was the First Class badge. It was a rite of passage, a marker on the way to Scout heaven which was, then, Queen Scout. Scout literature to this day has Queen Scout as the ‘pinnacle of effort and achievement’ and promises a presentation at Government House.
Well, I was a Queen Scout, but certainly I never made it to Government House.
Wellington was a world away. A privileged few went by air, on a DC3. The rest of us had to climb aboard the Hinemoa in Lyttelton, endure a night in a tiny cabin with three other passengers who invariably snored, and be woken at 6 a.m. by a warder with a cup of tea and two wine biscuits. I would have remembered that.
No, it’s more likely that I would have been given mine by God’s representative in New Brighton, Mr N. Reeder, D.C.
Before reaching such ethereal realms, however, Scouts had to get their First Class badges. They were an essential rite of passage. Every good Scout needed one to progress. Without a First Class badge you remained, I imagine, second class. I can’t remember whether there was a Scout Second Class. It seems rather a shabby label to hang on someone. But there was certainly a First Class, and we all wanted it desperately.
As part of your First Class badge you needed to complete a First Class Journey. When I was a Scout the essential mechanics of the First Class Journey were these: you, two small boys, were assigned an area you’d never been to before, and had no idea about; you were given a rough route, with several outstanding features you were required to note; you were provided with sparse instructions for each stage of the route; you were carted to the starting point, ejected from the car, and left to yourselves. There was no Child, Youth and Family then, and health and safety rules had yet to wriggle onto the national stage.
