They Grow Not Old - by Barbara Murray

During the years I attended Tauranga College, 1948, ’49 and ’50, the pupils were expected to take part in the Anzac Day Parade. If it was fine the ceremony was held at the Cenotaph just inside the Domain Memorial Gates that are almost opposite the present Courthouse, otherwise in the Town Hall.

 While two senior college cadets took up guard duty with their rifles at the entrance, the rest of us assembled on Cameron Road, between the corners of First Avenue and Elizabeth Street, stumbling about in confusion, bumping into each other as we gradually formed into blocks, four abreast. Those without a school blazer, as I was, were put in the middle of the column.

 The college students wore their winter uniform from Easter to Labour Weekend. The boys’ uniform barely changed from summer, always woollen shorts, knee-length woollen socks and black shoes, with shirts and caps, but the girls had two uniform hats, a white panama for summer, a navy felt for winter, and Anzac Day. With this we wore a navy woollen gymslip tied with a girdle, a long sleeved white blouse and striped tie, navy cardigan or school blazer, black woollen stockings and black lace-up shoes.

 The weather for the Anzac Day Parade in 1950 was hot and still. As we marched briskly along the middle of Cameron Road, accompanying veterans, returned servicemen, members of His Majesty’s Services and various community groups – Fire Service, St John Ambulance, Red Cross, Guides and Scouts – we became hotter and hotter, some students literally falling by the wayside where volunteer first-aiders attended them. That year we had three bands in attendance – Tauranga Highland Pipe, Tauranga Municipal and the Tauranga College Band.

 Through the speeches and prayers, the singing and the wreath laying ceremony, which included one carried by the college head boy and head girl, through the eerie notes of the Last Post and Reveille, we stood, sometimes at attention, other times uncomfortably at ease, red of face, hot and prickly of body with perspiration running in our armpits, around our waists and down our legs. This discomfort, together with the poignancy and solemnity of the occasion, and our own memories of the war years, produced a unique stress. Many of us had older relations, even fathers, who had served in the Armed Forces overseas and in danger. Some did not return. Every family in the town had been touched in some way by the conflict. War memorials and Commemoration Services always bring a lump into my throat, rendering me speechless, as they did on those Anzac Days too.

 Some of the Sixth Form boys wished they’d been just a little bit older so they might have had a chance to lie their way into the army and gone off to what they expected would be a great adventure.

 In 1967, by the time I was living back in 17^th Avenue (renamed from Hospital Street), the Returned Services Association complex in Gate Pa had opened and each year a dawn service was held there. My husband and I always wakened with the bugle calls and lay in our bed remembering…. Remembering Ian’s cousin, Gilbert, only five years his senior, who was killed in battle; that his father had rejoined the Army in 1940 aged 46 and spent two years at Waiouru Camp living in a canvas tent. When Army Headquarters realised they had enlisted an experienced lawyer, they posted him to the District Office in Paeroa, uprooting the family from Ōpōtiki where a Scottish WWI bride had come to live in 1921.

 And I lay remembering the Patriotic Shop and 500 Card Evenings, ration books, the air-raid shelter under our grapefruit tree and the huge, concrete tank traps built to frustrate possible Japanese landings along the Bay of Plenty coast; sitting in silence every Sunday morning listening to the casualty lists broadcast on national radio from Wellington.

It is a matter of honour and pride to wear the red poppy each year. This custom began following the publication of a poem In Flanders Field, penned by a Canadian medical officer, Major John Mc Crea, who tended the wounded and dying soldiers, and watched as more and more crosses were erected in a cemetery where the wild red poppies bloomed. The poem was first published in the English magazine Punch in December 1915 and was quickly reprinted in newspapers and magazines in English-speaking countries around the world. In 1918 it was decided to sell artificial red poppies to raise funds for ex-servicemen and their dependants and in 1921 the New Zealand Returned Services Association also decided to do this.

 Strangely it was the 1983 Anzac Day Service at the Tauranga R.S.A. that brought my birth mother into my life. I’d already been re-united with my birth father and it was his brother-in-law’s tragic death at the dawn ceremony that introduced me to an aunt who’d known and loved my mother. She said, “Don’t you believe all the stories you hear about what a horrible person your mother was. She wasn’t. She was lovely. If it hadn’t been for her, I’d have gone mad.” 

 (But that is another story.)

 Over the last few years I have been able, several times, to lead a Tauranga congregation in an Anzac Day Commemoration Service honouring the special day and the sacrifice of lives in war; honouring the courage of young men who became soldiers, sailors and airmen and left their homes to fight and die; the courage of the nurses who served overseas, sometimes under fire themselves; the courage of those who stayed at home, shouldering bigger burdens of work, fundraising, enduring long silences of news about their loved ones; the courage of those who spoke against war, refusing military service or work in industries such as munitions. Many of them became stretcher-bearers, others went to prison.

And I’ve been able to speak of these things around the lump that comes into my throat.