by Gee, Maurice
Books helped save me on Somes Island. (That’s a fourth thing, with Willi and our escapes, the caretaker’s family, and my morning vision of Wellington.) And they saved me, my grammar book and my dictionary, in that cold hole, Pahiatua. We transferred there in 1943, after the Swiss consul reminded the authorities that under the Geneva Convention internees must be kept away from possible fighting zones. With the Japanese advancing down the Pacific, Wellington was likely to be bombed. It took the authorities almost a year to change the racecourse at Pahiatua into a camp. They shifted us up by train in March 1943.I want to say nothing about the place. (I wish the consul had kept quiet.) We stayed for eighteen months and I’ve never been back. The cold there soaked through our skin like muddy water. It took up residence in our bones. The rheumatic old men groaned louder. They wept and wanted to die.
We worked for a time in great flapping tents. We looked out at nothing but low hills. I longed for the island that was the centre of my world. I longed for the city and the ships. My dictionary, my grammar book, lay beside my pillow where they might transfer words into my brain as I slept. I kept them whole with pieces of string. The wind, coming in the door, tried to flip pages away. When Hoch, walking by, snatched a front cover and sent it skimming at waist height along the barracks I did not know whether to run after it or leap at him and tear out his throat. ‘Jew,’ he said, which was the most he said to me up there. I retrieved the cover and then looked up the word. ‘A person of Hebrew descent,’ my dictionary said. It wiped Hoch out.
The books had belonged to a girl called Avis Greenough. Her name was printed inside the cover Hoch threw away. She went to Wellington Girls’ College and was in the sixth form in 1928. Avis, I said. Avis meant bird. Greenough, I said, pronouncing it Greenuff. The name was strange and wonderful but I kept possession of it by using the ordinariness of school and form and date. There was a girl who used this book, I said, and I laid my cheek on it almost as I would have laid my cheek on the caretaker’s child. It meant more to me than the rules of grammar – although by the time we left Pahiatua I believed I knew English grammar well.
We left because Polish refugee children needed the camp. They would have enjoyed Somes Island more. I came back to it like a home. I looked at the city with an intimate knowledge even though I had only been in the railway station and the cells.
There were fewer of us as the year went on. The Japanese were taken away for prisoner exchange and the Italians, allies now, were released. The Finn went to work on a coastal freighter and Moser in an electronics repair shop. (None of us knew he had those skills.) Germans were let go every week. Even one or two of the Hitlerites were freed, which drew a spate of letters from Willi to every Minister of the Crown he could find the name of. I no longer asked for my release. It would come. My aim now was to stay in New Zealand, by which I meant Wellington. I did not even mind the southerly gales on Somes Island but was simply happy not to be in Pahiatua.
I washed myself in the moving air and once or twice in the cold sea. There was a new commandant, Blaikie, a courteous man who preceded most of his statements with a nervous ‘Aha!’ I learned from him ‘Goodness gracious me!’ and ‘Well I never!’ and used them for many years until Nancy shook them out of me. Pengelly was gone. The guards were more relaxed. I began to learn their idioms and slang. I wanted all of English, its vulgarities, formal phrases, greetings, metaphors – every word. So I learned ‘go to pot’ and ‘clip on the ear’ and ‘belt on the lug’; learned ‘skite’ and ‘barmy’ and ‘you bet’. I could say, ‘Keep your eyes peeled’ and ‘Don’t give lip.’ ‘Strike me pink!’, ‘God strewth!’, I went about exclaiming. (For many years I thought ‘strewth’ was a word even though I could not find it in my dictionary.) ‘Rooting’ and ‘shagging’ were in my range if I should need them. I learned ‘yellowbelly’ too.
One of the guards said to me one day, ‘Grab a hold of me rifle, Joey, I need to take a leak.’ I held it as he peed against the trunk of a tree, held it as though presenting arms. The war must be over, I thought. Goodness gracious me!
Karl Kraus used to talk about the moral function of language. And Wittgenstein, another Viennese, was seeking, among other things, its ethical dimensions. I don’t know about all that. I know that language, a new language, helped put me together after I’d been broken apart. English was sometimes fast and then was slow; it put its shoulders up and groaned and twisted at the lumps it must smooth out, and the sprinting it must do when it was already out of breath. It was not the easy language I’d once thought. I did not mind. I was used to knuckly, gristly, meaty, nourishing constructions. And English became more, for there were places I could go that I’d not gone in German. Perhaps all I’m saying is that English was my language as I came to life again, even if I had to put it first by an act of will.
‘Good as gold,’ I learned to say. I stood on top of the island and shouted, ‘Good as gold!’ without any belief that it was true, but hoping that the words would carry me with them by some magic. It was like smiling in order to be happy. Willi, learning too, coming on me there, told me I was ‘off my rocker’.
Most of the time we spoke German, of course. And life on Somes Island was not suddenly ‘hunky dory’. We saw men leaving all the time. The Samoan Germans, no longer a threat as the Pacific war went back the way it had come, were shipped home. Fewer than fifty men were left by November – and what threat were we? Willi said they punished us for what we had in our skulls. ‘For our brains,’ he said. They are frightened of us.’
They don’t know what to do with us,’ I said. They can’t send us back to Europe yet.’
‘As long as they send Hoch and von Schaukel,’ Willi said. ‘I want them to see the Russians string Hitler up.’
I might have said, ‘I want them to see extermination camps’, which we were beginning to learn about. But I could not make the words, in English or in German. I could not make them part of my conversation. So I complained that there was enough stupidity about for the Nazis to stay in New Zealand and Willi – although I said it under my breath – to be shipped off to Germany. It made me angry to think of but I could handle emotions of that size.
The Nazis were a shrunken band by the end of the year. They knew their war was lost and their thousand-year Reich would not last another six months. The Ardennes offensive may have had them singing and saluting again, I do not know. I was off Somes Island by that time. Blaikie had told me to appeal again. It would help my chances of staying in New Zealand, he said, if I were in some essential job and seen to be working diligently. ‘Diligently’ – the first time I had heard the word, although I knew it from my dictionary. I smiled at him and took his advice.
I left Somes Island early in December, wearing the clothes I had arrived in, carrying my suitcase with my books inside, wrapped in a shirt. I took away a few polished paua shells which I hoped to sell. We had been forbidden to make ornaments because we might compete with returning servicemen, so I had only a few coins in my pocket. I did not mind. My first stop would be the National Service Department, which would direct me to a job.
‘You will not,’ Blaikie said, reading from a paper on his desk, ‘do or assist in anything helpful to an enemy with which New Zealand may be or remain at war, and not in words or writing discuss the war against either Germany or Japan, or put forward sentiments –’ and so on. I loved the words, and admired the style, and I sat down and signed the promise, smiling.
‘Attention, Mandl’ he said. ‘You’re to understand that you are –’ he read again ‘– still subject to the Aliens Emergency Regulations so long as the Regulations continue in force …’, which was likely to be as long as New Zealand remained at war. I could be re-interned whenever the authorities thought it necessary.
‘Yes,’ I said, smiling no more.
‘That’s all. You can go.’ And he added for himself, ‘Aha, Mandl. Good luck.’
His decency was a sign that I was almost free. I wanted to shake his hand – almost gave it a try
– but went out into the spring air and felt the sergeant push my back to send me on my way. There was, though, an hour to fill in, so I said to Willi, ‘Come and have a walk with me. I can’t sit around.’ He was writing another letter – this one to a politician called Holyoake. Willi was trying to get an official declaration that he had not been locked up for Nazi activities and that he had opposed the Nazis in the camp. I have read some of his letters in his file at the National Archives: ‘Before el Alamein, before Stalingrad, I stood up in this camp against two hundred German, Italian and Japanese fascists and the mob of cowards who were turning their coats to the victorious signs of Swastika and Rising Sun, stood and was manhandled, abused, boycotted by this mob …’ I would have admired Will’s style too. But what he says is true, largely true. If the camp had a hero it was Willi. When the Nazis paraded in their swastikas after the occupation of Paris and Dowden and his guards failed to disperse them it was Willi who charged their ranks, armed with a leg torn off a bed. ‘My reward, a Deportation Order.’ He told Prime Minister Fraser, ‘For the sake of New Zealand’s and our good name’, that he must release the anti-Nazis before the hard-core Nazis, but left Somes Island on the same launch as Hoch and von Schaukel. He pleaded for a letter that certified he was anti-Nazi to take back to Germany for his credit there, or just to make himself safe, and Bartram, the Under-Secretary, wrote to his minister: ‘I think it would be a mistake to arm him now with a letter signed by a responsible Minister of the Crown to the effect that he was not interned because of Nazi activities. Gauss is a glib-tongued opportunist and has the continental’s capacity for distortion and making mischief. He would be almost certain to misuse it. He is, I have to add, a libertine and a seducer of women.’
Willi had his letter though. There is a copy on his file. It came from Holyoake, a member of the party on the right. ‘National? They are National Socialist,’ Willi had sneered. How Holyoake’s letter must have surprised him: ‘It is definitely recognised that you are, in both outlook and activity, anti-Nazi. If you desire it a certificate will be issued to this effect.’ No Labour Party politician showed such a sense of ‘fair play’.
Willi said no to my invitation, so I left him writing in the sun and walked around Somes Island on the clean path we had made. At the south end, under the cliffs, a pair of shags stood like black crosses on the reef, drying their wings. Above me, out of bounds, anti-aircraft guns waited in concrete pits for Japanese bombers that would never come. The shags, I thought, were more threatening – and then I thought, No, they’re birds, that’s all, only birds. So I looked again and saw shags being shags, and I have loved them ever since.
I walked anti-clockwise, losing my view of Wellington city but meaning to end with it. A naval launch was tying up at the wharf and two Wrens from the degaussing station were waiting to go aboard. I stopped on the beach path and pretended to tie a shoe lace. If I could time it right I would pass the foot of the wharf as the replacement pair stepped on to the path. It was a long time since I had seen a woman close. I felt my fingers tremble as I fumbled with the lace. I did not want breasts and legs and hips – though Will’s talk was frequently of those, and other parts. I wanted to see a woman’s face. The new pair stopped on the wharf and chatted with the ones they were relieving. I could not risk standing in the open any more so I moved behind a tree. The charge would not have been spying: the war had moved too far away for that. It would have been – I do not know the word, so our modern ‘perving’ will have to do; and useless for me to claim that my desire was pure. Blaikie would have blushed as he dealt with me.
I waited there five minutes, in great danger, for still there was a guard who walked the paths. I watched for him on the clear stretch coming down the hill, and pleaded with the Wrens: Come on, come on. Surely they should salute and pass. But these were easy days and discipline was gone. I heard them laugh – clear laughter on the sea. The two who were leaving did a quick amazing dance, no more than a step or two – the jitterbug – showing perhaps how they meant to spend their leave. Then, at last, the new ones broke away: a large woman, a small one, in black uniforms and black and white hats. They walked along the wharf in step, as though some order were now restored; and I came from behind my tree and advanced to meet them, whistling through my dry lips unconcernedly. They saw me as they stepped on to the path, and the smaller one, startled, flung up her arm and shied away. Then she recovered and spat at me, ‘Shoo! Scat!’, flicking her hand. She was dark and pretty, china white on her brow and as pink as candy in her cheeks. ‘Go away,’ she said. The larger woman held me with her gaze. ‘He’s harmless, Moira.’ She was brown-haired – brown and blonde – and broad in her cheeks and full in her mouth, full in her chin. Her eyes were blue and mild, mild, mild. She quite wiped the other out. I did, with her, look at breasts and hips, they were so round, so very much presented in a natural way – made nothing of. She saw my look and gave a little smile. Slanting down her finger, she drew a quarter-circle I might walk around her on my way, and I followed it; and at the end a guard, coming down the hill, shouted, ‘Clear out, Joey. Double quick.’ When I looked again the Wrens were chatting with him and lighting cigarettes. I did not mind but went on up the hill towards the barracks. She had made me easy. It was as if she had finished Somes Island for me and started up my life outside.
I fetched my suitcase from my bed, took no last look at anything, called Willi from his place in the sun and walked with him down to the wharf.
‘I’ll write, Willi. It won’t be long. You’ll soon be out.’
‘And on a ship going to Germany.’
‘There aren’t any ships yet. You’ll stay. Wait and see.’
He would not let me cheer him up, for he was left with only Steinitz now for company. The rest were Nazis, although they were, most of them, denying it. I told Willi they were frightened of him. They think you’ll go back there and tell the truth and get them shot.’
‘No one will believe what I say.’ It was the only time I ever knew him pity himself. But he recovered: ‘Have a girl for me, Josef’ – and could not resist a sneer: ‘Even if you can’t have one for yourself.’
We sat on the wharf and waited for Wishart’s launch, and Willi surprised me. I had thought he hated Somes Island but he said, ‘I would like to buy this place.’
‘You can’t own property, Willi. You’re a communist.’
He smiled and turned away. ‘I can be anything you like.’
The launch came round the tip of Leper Island.
‘I’ll take your place,’ he said. ‘You stay here. We can go in the bushes and change clothes.’
For a moment I thought he meant it. He saw my fright and laughed with his old malicious glee. ‘Enjoy yourself, Josef,’ he said, and jumped up and walked away before I could shake hands or embrace him. He trudged up the hill past the graveyard.
But Willi was not the person I watched as I left Somes Island. The two Wrens had come out of the degaussing hut. The small one stood on the beach and the large woman with the mild blue eyes climbed a short way up the grassy hill. Each had a pair of flags, red and white halved diagonally, and they began sending semaphore messages to each other. I suppose it was practice. Perhaps it was just fun. They were fast. Their red and white flags darted, then fell into a neutral place, crossed on their thighs. The small woman signalled, the tall one replied. So the last thing I saw as I left Somes Island was Nancy talking on the side of the hill.
NINE
I found a room in Thorndon in the back yard of a house. It was one of a pair in a lean-to shed beside a vegetable garden. The doors opened into the dark like the mouths of caves. At the end of the building was a room containing a hand basin and a bath. Two cubicles opened off. The smaller contained a toilet, the larger a set of tubs and a copper for boiling clothes, which also boiled water for the bath. I cooked on a gas ring in my room. I cleaned with a broom and brush and shovel and washed the lino on my knees with an old pair of underpants and a bar of sandsoap. Fetching water from
two doors down was easy after the camps. I learned to keep a bucketful in my room for cooking and drinking.
Washday in New Zealand was always Monday but I was a working man so I boiled my sheets and shirts and underclothes when I got home from work on Saturday afternoon. My landlady in the house tut-tutted me and said I should get up early and do my washing on Monday morning before leaving for work. I pointed out that Wilf did his then, starting when the sun came up, which left me no time, and she agreed that it was difficult and allowed me Saturday in the end. ‘But don’t you try on Sunday,’ she said.
