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Dave Dobbyn – Lament for the Numb
From Overnight Success: Columbia/Sony [Buy]

NZ soldiers on Chunuk Bair, August 1915

The choice of music for this post is one of my favourite songs by a New Zealand songwriter. Yesterday was ANZAC Day. It’s one of the few occasions that kiwis assert our national identity, so I went to the University’s memorial service, which this year just happened to be in the familiar surroundings of New College Chapel.

As expected the choir did the event proud, singing Stanford‘s evening canticles in Bb and John Ireland‘s anthem Greater Love Hath No Man. The organ postlude was variations on Hyfrydol, a tune which is currently chasing me around the world…

The Vice Chancellor John Hood (a New Zealander, haha we’re taking over) read the lesson, and the President of the Oxford Turkish Society read an extract from Kemal Ataturk‘s speech at Gallipoli in 1932, which concludes:

“…you, the mothers, who sent their sons from faraway countries wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land. They have become our sons as well.”

USS West Point, the troop ship that took my grandfather to New Caledonia

Today, we are lucky that war is a remote, abstract concept for most of us in the West- something done by professional soldiers in countries far from our comfortable lives.

It’s hard for us younger people to imagine what life was like for those who lived through the World Wars. Here in Oxford, I’m always aware that this is the town where my English grandparents spent WW2, working for the British Ministry of Food after evacuation from London.

Recently I was sent a transcript of my New Zealand grandmother’s memories of WW2. My grandfather was called up for army service in August 1942, and he learned the news on the day of my mum’s first birthday party. This was my grandmother’s recollection, written in 1960 :

“…the phone rang at Rosemary’s first birthday party in August 1942. It was your father ringing to tell me that he had been called up and was going into the army. He was to report for duty in a week’s time! I felt as though the end of the world had come – my world anyway. All the presents for our little guests were forgotten – a basket full of balloons and sweets and toys. I suppose he just had to tell someone but what an end to a little girl’s first birthday party! You’ve heard about people ‘folding their tents and fading into the night’ – that’s how my friends seemed to go. Our hearts weren’t in the celebration any longer and anyway, the party was nearly over.”

Bourail, New Caledonia, where my grandfather served in WW2 with the 3rd New Zealand Division